THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

BY 

RALPH  ADAMS  CRAM 

LITT.D.,  F.A.I. A.,  F.R.G.S. 


BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 
dbe  ftitoergibe  preg 
1914 


COPYRIGHT,    1914,    BY   RALPH   ADAMS   CRAM 
ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED 

Published  May  1914 


SANTA 


To 

HER  GRACE  ADELINE  MARIE 
DUCHESS  OF  BEDFORD 


PREFACE 

IN  bringing  together  for  publication  lectures 
and  addresses  delivered  at  different  times,  be- 
fore various  audiences,  and  in  places  widely 
separated  from  each  other,  the  question  inevit- 
ably arises  whether  they  shall  be  printed  as  they 
were  given  or,  instead,  wholly  recast  through 
the  elimination  of  ideas  and  passages  that  are 
common  to  several  or  even  all  of  them.  To  fol- 
low the  latter  course  is  almost  impossible  with- 
out total  destruction  of  such  chain  of  thought 
as  may  exist,  and,  therefore,  it  seems  better  to 
rest  under  the  charge  of  indulging  in  vain  repeti- 
tions than  to  lay  one's  self  open  to  the  opposite 
charge  of  incoherency  of  thought. 

After  all,  there  is  no  longer  the  possibility  of 
novelty  in  ideas,  except  where  these  are  inde- 
fensible by  any  argument  based  on  history  and 
precedent :  the  fundamental  laws  —  spiritual, 
ethical,  philosophical  —  were  long  ago  either 
revealed  or  determined,  and  the  only  excuse  for 
their  reiteration  to-day  is  that  so  many  of  them 

vii 


PREFACE 

have  been  forgotten  and  overlaid  by  the  detri- 
tus of  loose  thinking,  it  must  fall  to  some  to 
rescue  them  from  their  temporary  (but  curiously 
periodic)  oblivion.  In  bringing  them  forward 
once  more,  the  best  one  can  hope  to  do  is  to 
clothe  them  in  some  new  dress  that,  however 
defective  it  may  be,  shall  yet  serve  to  arouse 
interest  and  attract  attention. 

So  these  fugitive  papers  must  stand  in  their 
original  estate,  repetitions  and  all,  on  the  chance 
that  whatever  things  are  in  them  worthy  of 
attention  (assuming  such  qualities  to  exist) 
shall  at  least  be  heard  for  their  much  speaking. 

So  far  as  the  title  is  concerned,  if  any  explana- 
tion or  justification  is  necessary  other  than  what 
will,  I  trust,  appear  from  the  contents  of  the 
essays  themselves,  let  me  say  that  by  the  words 
"The  Ministry  of  Art"  I  mean  that  function 
which  I  think  art  has  performed,  and  always 
can  perform,  as  an  agency  working  toward  the 
redemption  of  human  character;  and  in  this 
aspect  (which  is,  of  course,  only  one  of  several) 
it  takes  on  something  of  that  quality  which 
characterizes  the  ministers  of  the  Christian 
Church. 

viii 


PREFACE 

From  the  earliest  times  there  have  always 
been  three  major  orders  of  this  ministry,  bish- 
ops, priests,  and  deacons,  who  at  their  several 
ordinations  receive  "Character"  which  is  indel- 
ible, which  may  not  be  repeated,  and  which 
gives  them,  severally,  certain  definite  author- 
ity, with  power  to  administer  certain  sacra- 
ments. These  are  the  major  orders,  but  there 
are  minor  orders  as  well,  as  acolytes,  exorcists, 
readers,  who,  without  special  sacramental 
power,  are  yet  definitely  "ministers  "  of  religion. 

Now,  as  there  are  also  seven  major  sacra- 
ments, which  nevertheless  do  not  in  themselves 
take  up  and  include  all  that  sacramentalism 
which  is,  indeed,  not  only  the  most  essential 
element  in  the  Church,  but  also  the  very  under- 
lying law  of  life  itself,  extending  into  the  far- 
thest fringes  of  being,  so  the  ministerial  quality 
is  not  monopolized  by  the  divinely  established 
orders,  but  reaches  out  in  weakening  degree 
amongst  many  classes  of  men,  whereby  they 
themselves  are,  or  may  become,  "ministers" 
in  potency  and  in  fact. 

And  this  I  conceive  to  be  the  highest  function 
of  the  artist  and  the  art  that  is  his  agency  of 

ix 


PREFACE 

operation.  Not  that  I  would  for  a  moment 
make  this  an  exclusive  property;  art  has  suffi- 
cient reason  for  existence  in  its  quality  as  a  crea- 
tor of  simple,  sensuous  joy  and  refreshment;  as 
a  beneficent  force  expressing  itself  through  - 
and  absolutely  restricted  to  —  pure  beauty.  As, 
however,  each  material  thing  in  the  universe 
has  its  sacramental  quality,  expressing  a  secret 
spiritual  grace  through  an  outward  and  visible 
form,  from  the  crystalline  snowflake  that  sym- 
bolizes the  fancy  of  playful  angels  working 
under  inexorable  law,  to  the  mind  of  man  which 
is  but  the  crude,  material  type  of  the  very- 
Mind  of  God,  so  abstract  art  may  do  more  than 
make  life  beautiful  (at  times),  in  that  it  can 
act  symbolically,  tropically,  sacramentally,  and 
so  become  the  supreme  means  of  expressing, 
and  of  inciting  and  exalting,  those  emotions 
which  transcend  experience  and  may  not  in  any 
degree  find  voice  through  those  channels  of 
expression  which  are  entirely  adequate  for  the 
purposes  of  the  intellect. 

In  this  aspect  the  master  of  art  (the  word 
"artist"  has  acquired  a  sickly  connotation 
which  almost  rules  it  out  of  use  in  this  connec- 

x 


PREFACE 

tion)  wields  a  power  of  most  astonishing  mag- 
nitude, and  he  may,  if  he  likes,  become  through 
his  works  one  of  the  greatest  agencies  of  right- 
eousness and  light,  and,  conversely,  he  may  too 
easily  become  the  servant  of  damnation.  That 
he  has  so  often  become  the  latter  is  less  his  own 
fault,  perhaps,  than  that  of  society  itself,  which, 
when  it  periodically  strikes  its  downward  course, 
becomes  actually  poisonous,  and  very  swiftly 
metamorphoses  the  best  of  arts  and  the  most 
willing  of  artists  into  Circean  beasts.  If  the 
master  of  art  himself,  and  the  world  he  would 
serve,  were  more  clearly  and  persistently  con- 
vinced of  the  great  educational,  expressive,  and 
dynamic  force  of  art  as  art  and  as  a  sacra- 
mental agency,  it  is  even  possible  that,  though 
they  might  not  be  avoided,  the  depths  to 
which  civilization  periodically  falls  might  not 
be  so  abysmal  as  history  records,  the  crests 
more  enduring  and  prolonged,  the  nodal  points 
less  closely  set  together. 

And  now  again,  as  the  descending  curve  meets 
the  ascending  swell  and  we  confront  a  crossing 
of  tendencies  with  all  this  ever  has  implied  of 
cross-currents  and  confusion,  it  is  particularly 

xi 


PREFACE 

important  that  the  higher  aspects  of  art  in  all 
its  forms  should  be  brought  to  mind,  while  we 
call  upon  it  to  exercise  its  just  and  unique  func- 
tions of  expression  and  eduction.  There  is  a 
new  strength  in  all  the  arts,  as  always  happens 
when  the  power  that  created  them  is  losing 
force,  and  while  this  cannot  possibly  arrest  the 
fall  of  one  dynasty  or  the  rise  of  the  other,  it 
has  a  great  part  to  perform,  if  it  wholly  realizes 
itself,  in  giving  expression  to  all  that  is  worth 
preserving  in  an  era  so  fast  becoming  history, 
and  in  bridging  the  inevitable  chasm  now  open- 
ing between  one  definite  epoch  and  the  next.  In 
the  interregnum  we  may  expect  a  general  break- 
down of  what  we  now  consider  a  triumphant 
civilization,  but  the  artist  has  the  same  part  to 
play  here  that  was  so  splendidly  performed  by 
the  monasteries  of  the  Dark  Ages.  In  his  work, 
whatever  it  may  be,  he  must  record  and  preserve 
all  that  was  and  is  best  in  a  shattered  era,  that 
this  may  be  carried  over  into  the  next  and  play 
its  new  part,  no  longer  of  conservation  but  of 
re-creation. 

So,  in  a  sense,  the  artist  stands  as  a  minister 
in  minor  orders,  and  so  his  life  and  acts  take 

xii 


PREFACE 

hold  of  that  sacramentalism  that  is  the  founda- 
tion of  both  the  Church  and  the  world:  if  he 
plays  his  part  honestly  and  as  one  so  charged 
with  duties  and  privileges,  he  may  see  the  art 
to  which  he  is  sworn  become  once  more,  not 
only  a  great  recorder  of  true  civilization,  but  the 
surety  of  its  eventual  restoration. 

RALPH  ADAMS  CRAM. 

WHITEHALL, 
SUDBURY,  MASSACHUSETTS. 


CONTENTS 

I.     ART  THE  REVEALER  i 
II.     THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  THE  GOTHIC 

RESTORATION  19 

III.  THE  PLACE  OF  THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  PUBLIC 

EDUCATION  65 

IV.  THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD  103 
V.     THE  CRAFTSMAN  AND  THE  ARCHITECT  141 

VI.     AMERICAN  UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE  167 

VII.     THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART  213 


THE   MINISTRY   OF   ART 

I 

ART    THE    REVEALER 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 


ART    THE    REVEALER1 

AFTER  what  fashion  shall  I,  follower  of  art 
in  a  sense,  speak  on  this  debatable  sub- 
ject, here  at  the  inauguration  of  a  great  institu- 
tion of  culture  and  learning,  and  before  you, 
its  earliest  and  forever  most  honoured  guests, 
who  personally  and  officially  represent  Church, 
State,  and  School,  and  here  and  now  pay  tribute 
to  that  great  power  whose  duty  it  is  to  lead 
onward  and  forward  every[child  born  of  man, 
until,  man  at  last,  he  is  worthy  to  play  his  part 
in  the  life  that  opens  before  him  of  service  and 
charity  and  righteousness  and  worship. 

I  might  speak  of  art  historically,  as  the  per- 
fect flowering  of  sequent  epochs  of  civilization, 
as  the  evanescent  record  of  man's  power  of 
great  achievement,  as  a  glory  of  history  in 
Homer  and  Pheidias,  in  Virgil  and  Anthemius  of 

1  Address  at  the  inauguration  of  Rice  Institute,  Houston, 
Texas. 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

Tralles,  in  Ambrosian  chant  and  Gregorian 
plain-song,  in  the  Arthurian  legends  and  the 
Nibelungenlied,  in  Adam  of  St.  Victor  and 
Dante,  in  Cimabue  and  Giotto  and  their  great 
successors,  in  the  cathedrals  and  abbeys  of 
mediaevalism,  in  the  sculptures  of  Pisa  and 
Paris  and  Amiens,  in  Catholic  ceremonial,  in 
the  glass  of  Chartres,  the  tapestries  of  Flanders, 
the  metal-work  of  Spain,  in  the  drama  of  Mar- 
lowe and  Shakespeare,  in  the  music  of  modern 
Germany,  in  the  verse  of  the  English  Victori- 
ans. I  might  speak  of  art  as  an  ornament  and 
amenity  of  life,  a  splendid  vesture  covering 
the  nakedness  of  society.  I  might  speak  of  it 
in  its  economic  aspect,  or  as  the  handmaid 
and  exponent  of  religion. 

Art  is  so  great  a  thing,  so  inalienably  a  heri- 
tage and  a  natural  right  of  man,  it  has  all  these 
aspects,  and  more;  but  for  the  moment  I  nar- 
row myself  to  yet  another  consideration,  —  the 
function  of  art  as  an  essential  element  in  edu- 
cation. 

The  adjective  may  strike  you  strangely  - 
"an  essential  element"  —  not  an  accessory,  an 
extension ;  but  I  use  it  with  intention,  though  to 

4 


ART  THE  REVEALER 

justify  such  use  I  must  hasten  to  disavow  any 
reference  to  the  teaching  of  art  as  this  now  ob- 
tains either  in  art  schools  or  under  university 
faculties  of  fine  arts.  It  is,  I  admit,  hard  to  con- 
ceive such  teaching  as  being  of  necessity  an  in- 
tegral part  of  any  scheme  of  general  education, 
—  however  efficient  it  may  be  when  viewed  in 
the  light  of  its  own  self-determined  ends,  —  and 
I  should  expect,  from  no  source,  endorsement 
of  any  argument  for  the  universal  necessity  of 
an  art  education  conceived  on  similar  lines ;  but 
I  plead  for  a  higher,  or  at  least  broader,  type 
of  such  teaching,  because  I  try  to  place  myself 
amongst  those  who  set  a  higher  estimate  on 
art,  conceiving  it  to  be  not  an  applied  science 
or  a  branch  of  industrial  training,  or  yet  an  ex- 
treme refinement  of  culture  study,  but  simply 
an  indispensable  means  toward  the  achieve- 
ment of  that  which  is  the  end  and  object  of 
education,  namely,  the  building  of  character. 

There  were  days,  and  I  think  they  were  very 
bad  old  days,  when  it  was  held  that  education 
should  take  no  cognizance  whatever  of  charac- 
ter, of  the  making  of  sane,  sound,  honourable 
men  and  women,  but  only  of  mental  training 

5 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

and  mental  discipline.  Then  it  was  said  with 
grave  assurance  that  it  was  not  the  province  of 
public  education  to  deal  with  religion,  ethics, 
or  morals,  except  from  a  strictly  historical  and 
conscientiously  non-sectarian  standpoint,  and 
that  the  place  for  the  teaching  of  those  things 
was  the  HOME  —  spelled  with  very  large  capi- 
tals. After  a  while  the  compulsion  of  events 
forced  a  readjustment  of  judgments,  and  we 
became  conscious  of  the  fact  that  a  combina- 
tion of  influences  —  amongst  them  our  very 
schools  themselves  —  had  resulted  in  the  pro- 
duction of  homes  where  neither  religion  nor 
ethics  was  taught  at  all,  and  where  conscious 
character  building  was  of  the  most  superficial 
nature,  while  the  concrete  results  were  some- 
what perilous  to  society.  Struck  at  last  by  the 
fact  that  our  most  dangerous  criminal  classes 
were  made  up  of  those  who  were  thoroughly 
well  educated,  we  were  compelled,  as  Walt 
Whitman  says,  "to  reexamine  philosophies  and 
religions/*  and  some  of  us  came  to  the  conclu- 
sion that  if  the  schools  were  to  save  the  day  — 
as  they  certainly  must  and  certainly  could  —  a 
new  vision  was  necessary,  and  that  what  they 

6 


ART  THE  REVEALER 

were  set  to  do  was  the  bending  of  all  their  en- 
ergies and  powers  toward  character-building, 
toward  the  making,  not  of  specialists,  but  of 
fine  men  and  women,  and  good  citizens. 

Under  the  old  system  the  significance  of  art 
and  the  part  it  could  play  in'  education  were 
generally  ignored ;  it  was  treated  either  as  an 
"extra,"  as  a  special  study  like  Egyptology  or 
Anglo-Saxon,  and  so  regarded  as  the  somewhat 
effeminate  affectation  of  the  dilettante,  or  as 
a  "vocational  course,"  ranking  so  with  mining 
engineering,  dentistry,  and  business  science. 
So  taught,  it  was,  indeed,  no  essential  element 
in  general  education,  but  if  we  are  right  in  our 
new  view  of  the  province  thereof  it  may  be  that 
our  old  estimate  of  art  and  its  function  and  its 
significance  needs  as  drastic  a  revision,  and  that 
out  of  this  may  come  a  new  method  for  the 
teaching  of  art. 

What  is  it,  then,  this  strange  thing  that  has 
accompanied  man's  development  through  all 
history,  always  by  his  side,  as  faithful  a  servant 
and  companion  as  the  horse  or  the  dog,  as  in- 
separable from  him  as  religion  itself?  this  baf- 
fling potentiality  that  has  left  us  authentic  his- 

7 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

torical  records  where  written  history  is  silent, 
and  where  tradition  darkens  its  guiding  light  ? 
Is  it  simply  a  collection  of  crafts  like  hunting 
and  husbandry,  building  and  war  ?  Is  it  a  pas- 
time, the  industry  of  the  idle,  the  amusement  of 
the  rich  ?  None  of  these,  I  venture  to  assert,  but 
rather  the  visible  record  of  all  that  is  noblest  in 
man,  the  enduring  proof  of  the  divine  nature 
that  is  the  breath  of  his  nostrils. 

Henri  Bergson  says  in  speaking  of  what  he 
calls  —  inadequately,  I  think  —  intuition :  "  It 
glimmers  wherever  a  vital  instinct  is  at  stake. 
On  our  personality,  on  our  liberty,  on  the  place 
we  occupy  in  the  whole  of  nature,  on  our  origin, 
and  perhaps  also  on  our  destiny  it  throws  a 
light,  feeble  and  vacillating,  but  which  never- 
theless pierces  the  darkness  of  the  night  in 
which  the  intellect  leaves  us."  Here  lies  the 
province  of  art,  where  it  has  ever  lain ;  for  in 
all  its  manifestations,  whether  as  architecture, 
painting,  sculpture,  drama,  poetry,  or  ritual,  it 
is  the  only  visible  and  concrete  expression  of 
this  mystical  power  in  man  which  is  greater 
than  physical  force,  greater  than  physical  mind, 
whether  with  M.  Bergson  we  call  it  intuition 

8 


ART  THE  REVEALER 

or  with  Christian  philosophers  we  call  it  the 
immortal  soul. 

And  as  the  greatest  of  modern  philosophers 
has  curbed  the  intellectualism  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  setting  metes  and  bounds  to  the  prov- 
ince of  the  mind,  so  he  indicates  again  the 
great  spiritual  domain  into  which  man  pene- 
trates by  his  divine  nature,  that  domain  re- 
vealed to  Plato  and  Plotinus,  to  Hugh  of 
St.  Victor  and  St.  Bernard  and  St.  Thomas 
Aquinas.  As  Browning  wrote,  "A  man's  reach 
must  exceed  his  grasp,  or  what  is  a  heaven  for," 
and  so,  as  man  himself,  transcending  the  lim- 
itations of  his  intellect,  reaches  out  from  the 
world  of  phenomena  to  that  of  the  noumenon, 
as  he  forsakes  the  accidents  to  lay  hold  on  the 
substance,  he  finds  to  his  wonder  and  amaze- 
ment the  possibility  of  achievement,  or  at  least 
of  approximation,  and  simultaneously  the  over- 
whelming necessity  for  self-expression.  He  has 
entered  into  a  consciousness  that  is  above  con- 
sciousness ;  words  and  mental  concepts  fail,  fall 
short,  misrepresent,  for  again,  as  M.  Bergson 
says,  "The  intellect  is  characterized  by  a  nat- 
ural inability  to  comprehend  life,"  and  it  is 

9 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

life  itself  he  now  sees  face  to  face,  not  the  iner- 
tia of  material  things,  and  it  is  here  that  art  in 
all  its  varied  forms  enters  in  as  a  more  mobile 
and  adequate  form  of  self-expression,  since  it 
is,  in  its  highest  estate,  the  symbolic  expression 
of  otherwise  inexpressible  ideas. 

Through  art,  then,  we  come  to  the  revelation 
of  the  highest  that  man  has  achieved ;  not  in 
conduct,  not  in  mentality,  not  in  his  contest 
with  the  forces  of  nature,  but  in  the  things  that 
rank  even  higher  than  these  —  in  spiritual 
emancipation  and  an  apprehension  of  the  ab- 
solute, the  unconditioned.  The  most  perfect 
plexus  of  perfected  arts  the  world  has  ever 
known  was  such  a  cathedral  as  Chartres,  before 
its  choir  was  defiled  by  the  noxious  horrors  of 
the  eighteenth  century;  when  its  gray  walls 
were  hung  with  storied  tapestries,  its  dim  vaults 
echoed  to  solemn  Gregorians  instead  of  operatic 
futilities,  and  the  splendid  and  dramatic  cere- 
monial of  mediaeval  Catholicism  made  visible 
the  poignant  religion  of  a  Christian  people. 
And  in  this  amazing  revelation  of  consummate 
art,  music  was  more  than  "a  concord  of  sweet 
sounds,"  painting  and  sculpture  more  than  the 

10 


ART  THE  REVEALER 

counterfeit  presentment  of  defective  nature, 
architecture  more  than  ingenious  masonry. 
Through  these,  and  all  the  other  assembled 
arts,  radiated,  like  the  coloured  fires  through 
the  jewelled  windows,  awe,  wonder,  and  wor- 
ship, of  men  who  had  seen  some  faint  adum- 
bration of  the  Beatific  Vision,  and  who  called 
aloud  to  their  fellows,  in  the  universal  language 
of  art,  the  glad  tidings  of  great  joy  that,  by  art, 
man  might  achieve,  and  through  art  he  might 
reveal. 

Now  if  art  is,  indeed,  all  this,  —  and  the 
proof  lies  clear  in  itself,  —  then  its  place  in  lib- 
eral education  becomes  manifest  and  its  claims 
incontestable.  If  education  is  the  eduction  of 
all  that  is  best  in  man,  the  making  possible  the 
realization  of  all  his  potentialities,  the  building- 
up  of  personality  through  the  dynamic  force  of 
the  assembled  achievements  of  the  human  race 
throughout  history,  and  all  toward  the  end  of 
perfecting  sane  and  righteous  and  honourable 
character,  then  must  you  make  art,  so  under- 
stood and  so  taught,  as  integral  a  part  of  your 
curriculum  as  natural  science,  or  mathematics, 
or  biology.  Not  in  dynastic  mutations,  not  in 

II 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

the  red  records  of  war,  not  in  economic  vacilla- 
tions, or  in  mechanical  achievements,  lies  the 
revelation  of  man  in  his  highest  and  noblest 
estate,  but  in  those  spiritual  adventures,  those 
strivings  after  the  unattainable,  those  emanci- 
pations of  the  human  soul  from  the  hindrance 
of  the  material  form,  which  mark  the  highest 
points  of  his  rise,  presage  his  final  victory,  and 
are  recorded  and  revealed  in  the  art  which  is 
their  voicing. 

The  Venus  of  Melos,  "Antigone,"  Ay  a 
Sophia,  Gregorian  music,  Latin  hymnology,  the 
"  Divina  Commedia,"  Giotto's  Arena  Chapel, 
Chartres,  Westminster  Abbey,  "Hamlet," 
Goethe's  "Faust,"  "Parsifal,"  "Abt  Vogler" 
—  all  great  art,  and  as  great  art  beyond  price ; 
but  greater,  more  significant  by  far  as  living  in- 
dications of  what  man  may  be  when  he  plays 
his  full  part  in  God's  cosmogony. 

Where  is  art  taught  in  this  sense  and  to  this 
end?  I  confess  I  do  not  know.  Indeed,  I  find 
in  many  places  laboratories  of  art  industry 
where,  after  one  fashion  or  another,  ambitious 
youth  —  and  not  always  well  advised  —  is 
shown  how  to  spread  paint  on  canvas ;  how  to 

12 


ART  THE  REVEALER 

pat  mud  into  some  quaint  resemblance  to  hu-^ 
man  and  zoological  forms ;  how  to  produce  the 
voice  in  singing ;  how  to  manipulate  the  fingers 
in  uneven  contest  with  ingenious  musical  instru- 
ments; how  to  assemble  lines'  and  washes  on 
Whatman  paper  so  that  an  alien  mason  may 
translate  them,  with  as  little  violence  as  possi- 
ble, into  terms  of  brick  and  stone  —  or  plaster 
and  papier  mache.  And  I  find  names,  dates, 
sequences  of  artists  taught  from  textbooks,  and 
sources  and  influences  taught  from  fertile  imag- 
inations, together  with  erudite  schemes  and 
plots  of  authorship  and  attribution ;  but  where 
shall  we  find  the  philosophy,  the  rationale  of 
art,  inculcated  as  an  elemental  portion  of  the 
history  of  man  and  of  his  civilization  ? 

Categories,  always  categories;  and  we  con- 
fuse them  to  our  own  undoing.  There  have  been 
historians  who  have  compiled  histories  with  no 
knowledge  of  art  and  with  scant  reference  to  its 
existence;  there  have  been  artists  who  have 
taught  art  with  no  knowledge  of  history  and 
with  some  degree  of  contempt  for  its  preten- 
sions ;  yet  the  two  are  one,  and  neither  —  from 
an  educational  standpoint — is  intelligible  with- 

13 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

out  the  other.  It  is  through  Homer  and  ^Eschy- 
lus  that  we  understand  Hellas;  through  Aya 
Sophia  that  we  understand  Byzantium ;  through 
Gothic  art  that  we  know  medievalism;  through 
St.  Peter's  and  Guido  Reni  that  the  goal  of  the 
Renaissance  is  revealed  to  us.  And  so,  on  the 
other  hand,  what,  for  example,  is  the  art  of  the 
Middle  Ages  if  we  know  nothing  of  the  burgeon- 
ing life  that  burst  into  this  splendid  flowering  ? 
What  are  the  cathedral  builders  to  us,  and  the 
myriad  artists  allied  with  them,  when  severed 
from  monasticism,  the  Catholic  revival,  the 
crusades,  feudalism,  the  guilds  and  communes, 
the  sacramental  philosophy  of  Hugh  of  St. 
Victor,  and  the  scholastic  philosophy  of  St. 
Thomas  Aquinas  ?  We  build  our  little  categori- 
cal box-stalls  and  herd  history  in  one,  art  in 
another,  religion  in  a  third,  philosophy  in  a 
fourth,  and  so  on,  until  we  have  built  a  laby- 
rinth of  little  cells,  hermetically  sealed  and  se- 
curely insulated,  and  then  we  wonder  that  our 
own  civilization  is  of  the  same  sort,  and  that 
over  us  hangs  the  threat  of  an  ultimate  burst- 
ing forth  of  imprisoned  and  antagonistic  forces, 
with  chaos  and  anarchy  as  the  predicted  end. 


ART  THE  REVEALER 

Again  we  approach  one  of  those  great  mo- 
ments of  readjustment  when  much  that  has 
been  perishes,  and  much  that  was  not,  comes 
into  being.  For  five  centuries  the  tendencies 
set  in  motion  by  the  Renaissance  have  had 
full  sway,  and  as  the  great  epoch  of  mediae- 
valism  ended  at  last  in  a  decadence  that  was 
inevitable,  so  is  it  with  our  era,  called  of  En- 
lightenment, the  essence  of  which  was  analysis 
as  the  essence  of  that  was  synthesis.  As  medi- 
aevalism  was  centripetal,  so  is  modernism  cen- 
trifugal, and  disintegration  follows  on,  faster 
and  ever  faster.  Even  now,  however,  the  falling 
wave  meets  in  its  plunge  and  foam  the  rising 
wave  that  bears  on  its  smooth  and  potent  surge 
the  promise  and  potency  of  a  new  epoch,  nobler 
than  the  last,  and  again  synthetic,  creative, 
centripetal. 

No  longer  is  it  possible  for  us  to  sever  being 
into  its  component  parts  and  look  for  life  in 
each  moiety ;  for  us,  and  for  our  successors,  the 
building-up  of  a  new  synthesis,  the  new  vision 
of  life  as  a  whole,  where  no  more  are  we  in- 
terested in  isolating  religion,  politics,  educa- 
tion, industry,  art,  like  so  many  curious  fever 

IS 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

germs,  but  where  once  more  we  realize  that 
the  potency  of  each  lies,  not  in  its  own  dis- 
tinctive characteristics,  but  in  the  interplay 
of  all. 

And  with  this  vision  we  return  to  the  con- 
sciousness that  all  great  art  is  a  light  to  lighten 
the  darkness  of  mere  activity,  that  at  the  same 
time  it  achieves  and  reveals.  So,  as  art  shows 
forth  man's  transfiguration,  does  it  also  serve 
as  a  gloss  on  his  actions,  revealing  that 
which  was  hid,  illuminating  that  which  was 
obscure. 

So  estimated  and  so  inculcated,  art  becomes, 
not  an  accessory,  but  an  essential,  and  as  such 
it  must  be  made  an  integral  portion  of  every 
scheme  of  higher  education.  A  college  can  well 
do  without  a  school  of  architecture,  or  music,  or 
painting,  or  drama,  and  the  world  will  perhaps 
be  none  the  poorer ;  but  it  cannot  do  without 
the  best  of  every  art  in  its  material  form,  and 
in  the  cultural  influences  it  brings  to  bear  upon 
those  committed  to  its  charge,  nor  can  it  play 
its  full  part  in  their  training  and  the  develop- 
ment of  their  character  unless  out  of  the  his- 
tory of  art  it  builds  a  philosophy  of  art  that  is 

16 


ART  THE  REVEALER 

not  for  the  embellishment  of  the  specialist  but 
for  all. 

"Man  is  the  measure  of  all  things,"  said  Pro- 
tagoras, and  with  equal  truth  we  can  say:  Art 
is  the  measure  of  man. 


II 

THE    PHILOSOPHY    OF    THE    GOTHIC 
RESTORATION 


II 

THE    PHILOSOPHY    OF    THE    GOTHIC 
RESTORATION1 

THIS  is  a  stimulating  subject  that  you 
have  set  me;  it  may  lead  us  far  —  it  has 
led  me  far,  as  you  are  destined  to  discover;  for 
there  is  this  about  art  —  and  particularly  archi- 
tecture, anyway,  —  it  refuses  to  stay  in  its  neat 
little  category  of  aesthetics,  and  branches  out 
amazingly  until  it  sends  its  roots  deep  down 
into  the  beginnings  of  things,  its  flower-tipped 
branches  high  up  into  the  free  air  of  prophecy. 
You  may  think  it  ought  to  be  easy  enough  for 
me  to  give  you  a  succinct  account  of  the  erratic 
growth  of  the  new  Gothic  spirit  in  architecture, 
from  the  early  nineteenth-century  Pugins  down 
to  the  latest  neo-mediaevalist  practising  to-day ; 
easy  enough  for  me  to  content  myself  with  what 
is  really  a  very  interesting  history  (and  task 
enough,  too,  for  that  matter),  but  if  you  do 
think  this  you  little  know  the  provocative  na- 

1  Read  before  the  Contemporary  Club  of  Philadelphia. 
21 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

ture  of  the  subject  —  or  the  susceptible  nature 
of  your  speaker.  No,  it  is  impossible  to  deal  with 
the  matter  in  a  superficial  way,  for  it  is  not  a  case 
of  adventuring  into  a  new  wonderland  of  style 
from  sheer  ennui,  for  the  sake  of  a  new  sensation : 
the  inception  and  growth  and  culmination  of  the 
new  Gothic  mode  is  not  a  whimsey  of  chance, 
a  sport  of  erratic  fancy ;  it  was  and  is  a  manifest- 
ation in  art  forms  of  a  world  impulse,  as  fun- 
damental as  that  which  gave  itself  visible  form 
in  the  Renaissance,  as  that  which  blossomed 
in  the  first  Gothic  of  the  twelfth  century,  as 
that  which  created  Aya  Sophia  or  the  Parthe- 
non. It  meant  something  when  it  happened,  it 
means  something  to  us  to-day,  it  will  mean  more 
to  our  children ;  and  deliberately  I  am  going  to 
disappoint  you  —  I  fear  —  by  trying  to  show 
what  this  is,  instead  of  telling  you,  and  demon- 
strating to  you  in  pictures,  what  our  forbears 
have  done,  what  some  of  us  are  trying  to  do 
to-day. 

I  am  convinced  there  is  nothing  accidental  in 
our  stylistic  development,  or  in  the  universe, 
for  that  matter.  There  was  once  a  very  wise 
man  who,  on  speaking  of  a  miracle  to  a  friend, 

22 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

and  being  confronted  by  the  assertion  that  the 
event  was  not  that  but  rather  a  coincidence, 
devoutly  said  that  he  thanked  God  he  was  not 
so  superstitious  as  to  believe  in  coincidences. 
So,  chaotic  and  illogical  as  our  devious  wander- 
ings after  the  strange  gods  of  style  may  be,  I 
am  disposed  to  think  that  even  here  we  may 
find  evidences  of  design,  of  a  Providence  that 
overrules  all  things  for  good;  "an  idea,"  as 
Chesterton  would  say,  "not  without  humour." 
For  chaos  is  the  only  word  that  one  can  justly 
apply  to  the  quaint  and  inconsequent  conceits 
in  which  we  have  indulged  since  that  monu- 
mental moment  in  the  early  nineteenth  century 
when,  architecturally,  all  that  had  been  since 
the  beginning  ceased,  and  that  which  had  never 
been  before,  on  land  or  sea,  began.  A  walk  up 
Fifth  Avenue  in  New  York,  from  Madison 
Square  to  the  Park,  with  one's  eyes  open,  is  an 
experience  of  some  surprises  and  equal  illumi- 
nation, and  it  leaves  an  indelible  impression 
of  that  primal  chaos  that  is  certainly  without 
form,  if  it  is  not  wholly  void.  Here  one  may  see 
in  a  scant  two  miles  (scant,  but  how  replete 
with  experiences !)  treasure-trove  of  all  peoples 

23 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

and  all  generations :  Roman  temples  and  Paris- 
ian shops;  Gothic  of  sorts  (and  out  of  sorts) 
from  the  "carpenter-Gothic"  of  1845,  through 
Victorian  of  that  ilk,  to  the  most  modern  and 
competent  recasting  of  ancient  forms  and  re- 
stored ideals ;  Venetian  palaces  and  Louis  Seize 
palaces,  and  Roman  palaces,  and  more  palaces 
from  wherever  palaces  were  ever  built ;  delicate 
little  Georgian  ghosts,  shrinking  in  their  un- 
premeditated contact  with  Babylonian  sky- 
scrapers that  poise  their  towering  masses  of 
plausible  masonry  on  an  unconvincing  sub- 
structure of  plate  glass.  And  it  is  all  contempo- 
rary,—  the  oldest  of  it  dates  not  back  two 
generations,  —  while  it  is  all  wildly  and  im- 
probably different. 

The  experience  prompts  retrospection,  and 
we  turn  over  the  dog-eared  leaves  of  the  imme- 
diate past ;  apparently  it  was  the  same,  only 
less  so,  back  to  the  decade  between  1820  and 
1830,  and  there  we  find  a  reasonably  firm  foot- 
hold. Here  at  last,  at  the  beginning  of  the  cen- 
tury, we  discover  actual  unanimity,  and  with 
some  relief  we  go  back  century  after  century, 
tracing  variations,  but  discovering  no  precedent 

24 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

for  the  chaos  we  have  left.  From  time  to  time, 
even  to  the  first  Olympiad,  we  suddenly  find 
ourselves  at  some  brief  period  where  a  fight  is 
manifestly  going  on ;  but  there  were  never  more 
than  two  parties  to  the  contest,  and  this  once 
passed,  we  have  another  four  or  five  centuries 
of  peaceful  and  unified  development.  Our  own 
Colonial  merges  without  a  shock  in  English 
Georgian;  this,  through  Inigo  Jones,  in  the 
Renaissance  of  the  Continent.  A  generation  of 
warfare  lands  us  in  Flamboyant  Gothic,  and 
so  to  real  Gothic  that  stretches  back  through 
logical  vicissitudes  to  the  twelfth  century. 
Another  upheaval,  and  in  a  moment  we  are 
with  the  Romanesque  that  touches  Rome 
itself,  and  behind  Rome  lies  Greece.  No  chaos 
here;  definite  and  lawful  development;  infin- 
ite variety,  infinite  personality,  and  a  vitality 
that  demands  a  more  illimitable  word  than 
"infinite."  What  happened,  then,  in  1825; 
what  is  happening  now;  what  is  going  to  hap- 
pen, and  why  ? 

We  may  try  for  an  answer,  but  first  we  must 
lightly  run  over  the  well-thumbed  leaves  again. 

We  all  know  what  our  own  Colonial  was  like; 
25 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

perhaps  we  do  not  fully  realize  how  varied  it 
was  as  between  one  section  and  another,  but 
at  least  we  appreciate  its  simplicity  and  direct- 
ness, its  honesty,  its  native  refinement  and 
delicacy,  its  frequent  originality.  It  is  not  the 
same  as  English  Georgian ;  sometimes  it  is  dis- 
tinctly better;  and,  however  humble  or  collo- 
quial, it  is  marked  always  by  extreme  good 
taste.  If  anything  it  improved  during  the  al- 
most two  centuries  of  Colonial  growth,  and 
when  the  nineteenth  century  opened  it  was  still 
instinct  with  life.  A  half-century  later  where 
were  we?  Remember  1850,  and  all  that  that 
date  connotes  of  structural  dishonesty,  barbar- 
ism, and  general  ugliness !  Here  is  the  debatable 
period,  and  we  may  narrow  it,  for  in  1810,  in 
1820,  good  work  was  still  being  done,  while  in 
1840,  yes,  in  1830,  the  sodden  savagery  diluted 
with  shameless  artifice  was  generally  preva- 
lent. To  me  this  decade  between  1820  and  1830 
is  one  of  the  great  moments  in  architectural 
history,  for  then  the  last  flicker  of  instinctive 
art  amongst  men  died  away,  and  a  new  period 
came  in.  Such  a  thing  had  never  happened 
before:  it  is  true  Rome  never  matched  Greece 

26 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

in  perfection  of  art ;  the  Dark  Ages  after  her  fall 
were  dark,  indeed ;  the  second  Dark  Ages  after 
the  death  of  Charlemagne  were  equally  black, 
while  the  transition  from  Gothic  to  Renaissance 
was  not  without  elements  of  disappointment, 
but  at  none  of  these  transitional  moments  were 
people  absolutely  wrong-headed,  never  was  the 
work  of  their  hands  positively  shameless.  Even 
now  we  put  their  poor  products  in  our  art 
museums,  where  they  are  not  outfaced  by  the 
splendid  monuments  of  the  great  and  crescent 
epochs.  In  a  word,  what  happened  about  1825 
was  anomalous ;  it  happened  for  the  first  time ; 
and  for  the  first  time  whatever  man  tried  to  do 
in  art  was  not  only  wrong,  it  was  absolutely  and 
unescapably  bad. 

I  should  like  to  deal  with  this  matter  in 
detail,  but  we  have  no  time.  In  a  word,  what 
had  happened,  it  seems  to  me,  was  this :  The 
Renaissance  had  struck  a  wrong  note  —  and 
in  several  things  besides  architecture ;  for  the 
first  time  man  self-confidently  set  to  work  to 
invent  and  popularize  a  new  and  perfectly  arti- 
ficial style.  I  am  not  concerned  here  with  the 
question  whether  it  was  a  good  style  or  not ;  the 

27 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

point  is  that  it  was  done  with  malice  afore- 
thought ;  it  was  invented  by  a  cabal  of  paint- 
ers, goldsmiths,  scenic  artists,  and  literary 
men,  and  railroaded  through  a  stunned  society 
that,  busied  with  other  matters,  took  what 
was  offered  it,  abandoned  its  old  native  ways, 
and  later,  when  time  for  thought  offered,  found 
it  was  too  late  to  go  back.  Outside  Italy  there 
was  as  little  desire  for  the  new-fangled  mode 
as  there  was  for  the  doctrinal  Reformation 
outside  Germany.  In  France  and  England  good 
taste  still  reigned  supreme,  and  though  the 
dogmatic  iconoclasts  took  good  care  that  the 
best  of  the  old  work  should  be  destroyed  and 
that  suspicion  should  be  cast  on  what  —  from 
sheer  exhaustion  —  they  allowed  to  remain ; 
though  for  one  reason  and  another  the  new 
Classic  style  came  in,  the  good  taste  of  the 
people  still  remained  operative,  and  while 
Italy  and  Germany  were  mired  in  Rococo  and 
Baroque,  they  continued  building  lovely  things 
that  were  good  in  spite  of  their  artificial  style, 
because  their  people  had  not  lost  their  sense  or 
their  taste. 

It  could  not  last,  however:  certain  essential 
28 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

elements  had  been  lost  out  of  life  during  the 
Renaissance  and  the  Reformation;  the  Revo- 
lution—  third  act  in  the  great  melodrama  — 
was  a  foregone  conclusion.  It  completed  the 
working-out  of  the  foreordained  plot,  and  after 
it  was  over  and  the  curtain  had  been  rung 
down,  whatever  had  been  won,  good  taste  had 
been  lost,  and  remained  only  the  memory  of  a 
thing  that  had  been  born  with  man's  civiliza- 
tion and  had  accompanied  it  until  that  time. 

You  cannot  sever  art  from  society ;  you  can- 
not make  it  grow  in  unfavourable  soil,  however 
zealously  you  may  labour  and  lecture  and  sub- 
sidize. It  follows  from  certain  spiritual  and 
social  conditions,  and  without  these  it  is  a  dead 
twig  thrust  in  sand,  and  only  a  divine  miracle 
can  make  such  bloom,  as  blossomed  the  staff  of 
St.  Joseph  of  Arimathea  at  Glastonbury. 

Well,  Alberti  and  Palladio  and  Inigo  Jones 
had  dissolved  and  disappeared  in  the  slim  re- 
finements of  American  Colonial.  What  fol- 
lowed ?  For  a  brief  time  and  in  one  or  two  cate- 
gories of  activity  the  spacious  and  delusive 
imitations  that  Jefferson  more  or  less  popular- 
ized, the  style  sometimes  known  as  "Neo- 

29 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

Grec,"  but  more  accurately  termed  —  because 
of  its  wide  use  for  Protestant  meeting-houses  in 
country  districts  —  the  "Graeco-Baptist"  style. 
You  know  it  ?  —  Front  porticoes  of  well-de- 
signed, four-foot  Classical  columns  made  of 
seven-eighths-inch  pine  stock,  neatly  nailed 
together,  painted  white,  and  echoing  like  a 
drum  to  the  incautious  kick  of  the  heel;  slab 
sides  covered  with  clapboards,  green  blinds  to 
the  round-topped  windows,  and  a  little  bit  of  a 
brick  chimney  sticking  up  at  the  stern  where 
once,  in  happier  days,  stood  the  little  cote  that 
housed  the  Sanctus  bell. 

Then  came  what  is  well  called  "Carpenter- 
Gothic,"  marked  by  the  same  high  indifference 
to  structural  integrity,  and  with  even  less  reli- 
ance on  precedent  for  its  architectural  forms; 
a  perfectly  awful  farrago  of  libelous  details,  — 
pointed  arches,  clustered  columns,  buttresses, 
parapets,  pinnacles,  —  and  all  of  the  ever- 
present  pine  lumber  painted  gray,  and  usually 
sanded  as  a  final  refinement  of  verisimilitude. 
And  with  these  wonderful  monuments,  cheek  by 
jowl,  Italian  villas,  very  white  and  much  bal- 
conied ;  Swiss  chalets,  and  every  other  imagin- 

30 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

able  thing  that  the  immortal  Batty  Langly,  or 
later  the  admirable  Mr.  Downing,  could  invent, 
with,  for  evidence  of  sterling  American  inge- 
nuity, the  "jig-saw-and-batten"  refinement  of 
crime.  We  really  could  not  stand  all  this,  you 
know,  and  when  the  Centennial  in  Philadelphia 
finally  revealed  us  as,  artistically  speaking,  the 
most  savage  of  nations,  we  began  to  look  about 
for  means  of  amendment.  We  were  not  strik- 
ingly successful,  as  is  evidenced  by  the  so-called 
"Queen  Anne"  and  "Eastlake"  products  of  the 
morning  after  the  celebration ;  but  the  Ruskin- 
ian  leaven  was  working,  and  a  group  of  men  did 
go  to  work  to  produce  something  that  at  least 
had  some  vestiges  of  thought  behind  it.  There 
is  much  of  this  very  strange  product  now  at 
large;  it  is  generally  considered  very  awful, 
indeed,  —  and  so  it  is  —  but  it  was  the  first 
sincere  and  enthusiastic  work  for  generations, 
and  demands  a  word  of  recognition.  Its  vivid 
ugliness  is  due  to  the  fact  that  in  the  space  of 
seventy-five  years  the  last  faintest  flicker  of 
sense  of  beauty  had  vanished  from  the  Amer- 
ican citizen;  its  intensity  of  purpose  bears 
witness  to  the  sincerity  of  the  men  who  did 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

it,  and  I  for  one  would  give  them  praise,  not 
blame. 

We  are  approaching  —  in  our  review  —  an- 
other era  in  the  development  of  our  architec- 
ture. Let  us  gather  up  the  many  strands  in 
preparation  therefor.  Here  were  the  "wild  and 
whirling  words  "  of  Hunt,  Eidlitz,  Furness ;  here 
is  the  grave  old  Gothic  of  Upjohn's  following, 
Renwick,  Congdon,  Haight, — admirable,  much 
of  it,  in  little  country  churches;  here  is  the 
Ruskinian  fold,  Cummings,  Sturgis,  Cabot,  — 
rather  Bostonian,  you  will  note;  here  was  the 
old  Classical  tradition  that  had  slipped  very, 
very  far  from  the  standards  of  Thornton,  Bui- 
finch,  McComb,  now  flaring  luridly  in  the  ap- 
palling forms  of  Mullet's  Government  buildings, 
and  the  Philadelphia  City  Hall.  Let  us  pursue 
the  subject  no  further:  there  were  others,  but 
let  them  be  nameless ;  we  have  enough  to  indi- 
cate a  condition  of  some  complexity  and  a  cer- 
tain lack  of  conviction,  or  even  racial  unity. 
Then  the  Event  occurred,  and  its  name  was 
H.  H.  Richardson.  The  first  great  genius  in 
American  architecture,  he  rolled  like  an  aes- 
thetic Juggernaut  over  the  prostrate  bodies  of 

32 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

his  peers  and  the  public,  and  in  ten  years  we  did 
have  substantial  unity.  We  were  like  the  vil- 
lage fireman  who  did  n't  care  what  colour  they 
painted  the  old  tub,  so  long  as  they  painted  her 
red :  we  did  n't  care  what  our  architecture  was 
so  long  as  it  was  Romanesque.  For  another  ten 
years  we  had  a  love-feast  of  cavernous  arches, 
quarry-faced  ashlar,  cyclopean  voussoirs  and 
seaweed  decorations;  village  schools,  railway 
stations,  cottages,  —  all,  all  were  of  the  sacro- 
sanct style  of  certain  rather  barbarous  peoples 
in  the  south  of  France  at  the  close  of  the  Dark 
Ages. 

And  in  another  ten  years  Richardson  was 
dead,  and  his  style,  which  had  followed  the 
course  of  empire  to  the  prairies,  and  the  alkali 
lands,  and  the  lands  beyond  the  Sierras ;  and  a 
few  years  ago  I  found  some  of  it  in  Japan !  It 
was  splendid,  and  it  was  compelling,  as  its  dis- 
coverer handled  it,  but  it  was  alien,  artificial, 
and  impossible,  equally  with  the  bad  things  it 
displaced.  But  it  did  displace  them,  and  Rich- 
ardson will  be  remembered,  not  as  the  discov- 
erer of  a  new  style,  but  as  the  man  who  made 
architecture  a  living  art  once  more. 

33 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

Eighteen  hundred  and  ninety,  and  we  start 
again.  Two  tendencies  are  clear  and  explicit. 
A  new  and  revivified  Classic  with  McKim  as  its 
protagonist,  and  a  new  Gothic.  The  first  splits 
up  at  once  into  three  lines  of  development :  pure 
Classic,  Beaux  Arts,  and  Colonial,  each  vital, 
brilliant,  and  beautiful  in  varying  degrees.  The 
second  was?  and  remains,  more  or  less  one,  a 
taking-over  of  the  late  Gothic  of  England  and 
prolonging  it  into  new  fields,  sometimes  into 
new  beauties.  So  matters  run  on  for  another 
ten  years.  At  the  end  of  that  time  the  pure 
Classic  has  won  new  laurels  for  its  clean  and 
scholarly  beauty;  the  Beaux  Arts  following  has 
abandoned  much  of  its  banality  of  French  bad 
taste  and  has  become  better  than  the  best  con- 
temporary work  in  France;  the  neo-Colonial 
has  developed  into  a  living  thing  of  exquisite 
charm,  while  the  Gothic  advance  has  been  no 
less  than  that  of  its  Classical  rival  —  or  should 
I  say,  bedfellow  ? 

And  now  two  new  elements  enter ;  steel-frame 
construction  on  the  one  hand,  on  the  other, 
the  secessionist.  The  steel  frame  is  the  enfant 
terrible  of  architecture,  but  like  so  many  of  the 

34 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

same  genus  it  may  grow  up  to  be  a  serious- 
minded  citizen  and  a  good  father.  It  is  n't  that 
now;  it  is  a  menace,  not  only  to  architecture, 
but  to  society,  but  it  is  young  and  it  is  having 
its  fling.  If  we  can  make  it  realize  that  it  is 
a  new  force,  not  a  substitute,  we  shall  do  well. 
When  it  contents  itself  in  its  own  proper  sphere, 
and  the  municipality  says  kindly  but  firmly, 
"thus  far  and  no  farther,"  —  the  "thus  far" 
being  about  one  hundred  and  twenty-five  feet 
above  street  level,  as  in  my  own  wise  town  of 
Boston,  —  then  it  may  be  a  good  servant.  Like 
all  good  servants  it  makes  the  worst  possible 
master;  and  when  it  claims  as  its  chiefest  virtue 
that  it  enables  us  to  reproduce  the  Baths  of 
Caracalla,  vaults  and  all,  at  half  the  price,  or 
build  a  second  Chartres  Cathedral  with  no 
danger  from  thrusting  arches,  and  with  flying 
buttresses  that  may  be  content  beautifully  to 
exist,  since  they  will  have  no  other  work  to  do, 
then  it  is  time  to  call  a  halt.  The  foundation  of 
good  architecture  is  structural  integrity,  and  it 
does  not  matter  if  a  building  is  as  beautiful  as 
the  Pennsylvania  Station  in  New  York;  if  its 
columns  merely  hide  the  working  steel  within, 

35 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

if  its  vast  vaults  are  plaster  on  steel  frame  and 
expanded  metal,  then  it  is  not  architecture,  it  is 
scene-painting,  and  it  takes  its  place  with  that 
other  scene-painting  of  the  late  Renaissance 
to  which  we  mistakenly  apply  the  name  of 
architecture. 

The  secessionist  —  one  might  sometimes  call 
him  Post-Impressionist,  Cubist,  even  —  is  the 
latest  element  to  be  introduced,  and  in  some 
ways  he  is  the  most  interesting.  Unlike  his 
confreres  in  Germany,  Spain,  and  Scandinavia, 
he  shows  himself  little  except  in  minor  domestic 
work  —  for  at  heart  we  are  a  conservative  race, 
whatever  individuals  may  be,  —  but  here  he  is 
stimulating.  His  habitat  seems  to  be  Chicago 
and  the  Pacific  Coast ;  his  governing  conviction 
a  strongly  developed  enmity  to  archaeological 
forms  of  any  kind.  Some  of  the  little  houses  of 
the  Middle  West  are  striking,  quite  novel,  and 
inordinately  clever;  some  of  the  Far  Western 
work,  particularly  around  Pasadena,  is  exquis- 
ite, —  no  less.  Personally  I  don't  believe  it  is 
possible  wholly  to  sever  one's  self  from  the  past 
and  its  forms  of  expression,  and  it  certainly 
would  be  undesirable ;  on  the  other  hand,  how- 

36 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

ever,  the  astute  archaeology  of  some  of  our  best 
modern  work,  whether  Classic  or  Gothic,  is 
stupefying  and  leads  nowhere.  Out  of  the  inter- 
play of  these  two  much  of  value  may  arise. 

And  there  you  are :  three  kinds  of  Classic,  two 
kinds  of  Gothic,  skeleton-frame,  and  secession- 
ist, all  are  operative  to-day ;  each  with  its  strong 
following,  each,  one  admits,  consummately 
clever  and  improving  every  day ;  for  there  is  no 
architectural  retrogression  in  America ;  there  is 
steady  and  startling  advance,  not  only  in  facil- 
ity for  handling  and  developing  styles,  but  in 
that  far  more  important  matter,  recognition  of 
the  fact  that  styles  matter  far  less  than  style. 
From  a  purely  professional  standpoint  the  most 
encouraging  thing  is  that  breadth  of  culture, 
that  philosophical  insight  into  the  essence  of 
things,  that  liberality  of  judgment  that  mark  so 
many  of  the  profession  to-day.  Gone  are  the 
old  days  of  the  "Battle  of  the  Styles";  the 
swords  are  beaten  into  pruning-hooks,  and  these 
are  being  used  very  efficiently  in  clearing  away 
the  thicket  of  superstitions  and  prejudices  that 
for  so  long  choked  the  struggling  flower  of  sound 
artistic  development.  The  Goth  and  the  Pagan 

37 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

can  now  meet  safely  in  street  or  drawing-room 
without  danger  of  acute  disorder;  even  the 
structural  engineer  and  the  artist  preserve  the 
peace  (in  public) ;  for  all  have  found  out  that 
architecture  is  much  bigger  than  its  forms,  that 
the  fundamental  laws  are  the  same  for  all  good 
styles,  and  that  the  things  that  count  are  struc- 
tural integrity,  good  taste,  restraint,  vision,  and 
significance.  No  one  now  would  claim  with  the 
clangour  of  trumpets  that  the  day  of  victory 
was  about  to  dawn  for  the  Beaux  Arts,  Gothic, 
or  steel-frame  styles,  or  for  any  other,  for  that 
matter;  each  is  contributing  something  to  the 
mysterious  alembic  we  are  brewing,  and  all  we 
hope  is  that  out  of  it  may  come  the  Philoso- 
pher's Stone,  that,  touching  base  metal,  shall 
turn  it  into  refined  gold  —  which,  by  the  way, 
is  the  proper  function  of  architecture  and  of 
all  the  arts. 

Chaos  then  confronts  us,  in  that  there  is  no 
single  architectural  following,  but  legion ;  and  in 
that  fact  lies  the  honour  of  our  art,  for  neither 
is  society  one,  or  even  at  one  with  itself.  Ar- 
chitecture is  nothing  unless  it  is  intimately 
expressive,  and  if  utterly  different  things  clam- 

38 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

our  for  voicing,  different  also  must  be  their 
architectural  manifestation.  You  cannot  build 
a  Roman  Catholic  or  Episcopal  church  in  the 
Beaux  Arts  vernacular  (it  has  been  done,  but  it 
is  extremely  silly);  because  the  Church  is  the 
eternal  and  fundamentally  immutable  thing  in 
a  world  of  change  and  novelty  and  experiment, 
and  it  has  to  express  this  quality  through  the 
connotation  of  the  forms  it  developed  through  a 
thousand  years  to  voice  the  fulness  of  its  genius 
that  was  developing  simultaneously.  Neither 
can  you  use  the  steel  frame  or  reenforced  con- 
crete to  the  same  ends,  though  this  very  sordid 
wickedness  has  also  been  perpetrated,  I  have 
grounds  for  believing.  On  the  other  hand, 
think  of  using  the  consummate  art  of  Chartres 
Cathedral  for  a  railway  terminal,  or  the  Ste. 
Chapelle  for  a  stock  exchange,  or  Haddon  Hall 
for  an  Atlantic  City  hotel,  or  the  Ducal  Palace 
in  Venice  for  a  department  store,  or  the  Erech- 
theion  for  a  fire-engine  house.  The  case  has 
merely  to  be  stated  to  be  given  leave  to  with- 
draw, and  with  it  goes,  for  the  time,  the  talk 
we  once  heard  of  an  "American  Style."  Styles 
come  from  unity  of  impulse ;  styles  come  from  a 

39 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

just  and  universal  estimate  of  comparative 
values ;  styles  come  where  there  is  the  all-envel- 
oping influence  and  the  vivid  stimulus  of  a  clear 
and  explicit  and  compelling  religious  faith ;  and 
these  occur,  not  at  the  moment  of  wild  confu- 
sion when  one  epoch  of  five  centuries  is  yield- 
ing to  another,  but  after  the  change  in  dynasty 
has  been  effected,  and  the  new  era  has  begun 
its  ascending  course.  The  only  premeditated 
architecture  I  know,  the  only  style  that  was 
deliberately  devised  and  worked  out  according 
to  preconceived  ideas,  —  the  style  of  the 
Renaissance,  —  was  yet  not  half  so  artificial 
as  it  looks  (and  as  some  of  us  would  like  to 
think),  for  in  a  sense  it  was  inevitable,  granting 
the  postulates  of  the  humanists  and  the  flimsy 
dogmas  of  the  materialists  of  the  fifteenth 
century.  It  did  not  develop  insensibly  and 
instinctively  like  Hellenic  and  Byzantine  and 
Gothic  and  Chinese  Buddhist  art,  —  the  really 
great  arts  in  history,  —  but  once  the  great 
parabola  of  mediaeval  civilization  curved  down- 
ward to  its  end,  once  Constantinople  fell,  some- 
thing of  the  sort  was  not  to  be  escaped. 
Now  I  do  not  feel  that  we  shall  be  content 
40 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

with  an  art  of  the  scope  of  that  of  the  Renais- 
sance; I  do  not  feel  that  we  shall  be  content 
with  a  new  epoch  of  civilization  on  Renaissance 
lines.  There  are  better  ways  of  life,  and  saner, 
and  more  wholesome,  and  after  Constantinople 
has  fallen  again  (God  send  the  day  quickly),  so 
marking  the  end,  as  the  other  fall  in  1453,  five 
centuries  ago,  marked  the  beginning,  of  the 
epoch  now  nearing  the  moment  of  its  dissolu- 
tion, I  believe  all  the  wonderful  new  forces,  now 
working  hiddenly,  or  revealing  themselves  spo- 
radically, will  assemble  to  a  new  synthesis  that 
will  have  issue  in  a  great  epoch  of  civilization  as 
unified  as  ours  is  disunited,  as  centripetal  as 
ours  is  centrifugal,  as  spiritually  efficient  as  ours 
is  materially  efficient,  and  that  then  will  come, 
and  come  naturally  and  insensibly,  the  inevit- 
able art  that  will  be  glorious  and  great,  because 
it  shows  forth  a  national  character,  a  national 
life  that  also  is  great  and  glorious. 

Reduced  to  its  simplest  terms,  our  architec- 
ture is  seen  to  have  had  two  epochs;  the  first 
the  attempted  conservation  of  a  definite  style 
which,  whatever  its  genesis,  had  become  an 
essential  part  of  our  racial  character,  and  its 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

complete  disappearance  exactly  at  the  time 
when  the  serious  and  conservative  nature  of  the 
people  of  the  United  States  gave  place,  with 
almost  equal  suddenness,  to  a  new  quality  born 
partly  of  political  independence,  partly  of  new 
and  stimulating  natural  conditions,  partly  of 
the  back-wash  from  Continental  revolution,  and 
above  all  of  the  swift  working-out,  at  last,  of 
powers  latent  in  the  Renaissance-Reformation 
itself.  Second,  the  confused  activities  of  many 
men  of  many  minds,  who  had  cut  loose  from 
tradition  become  moribund,  and  who  were  in 
the  position  of  the  puppy  sent  by  express,  whose 
destination  could  not  be  determined  because,  as 
the  expressman  said,  he  "had  eat  his  tag." 
Communal  interests,  the  sense  of  solidarity 
inherited  from  the  Middle  Ages  (which  gives 
us  the  true  pattern  of  the  only  possible  social- 
ism) persisting  in  strange  new  forms  even 
through  the  Renaissance  epoch  itself,  had 
yielded  to  a  crescent  individualism,  and  archi- 
tecture, like  a  good  art,  followed  close  to  heel. 

This  is  really  all  there  is  to  our  architectural 
history  between  Jamestown  and  Plymouth 
Rock  at  one  end,  and  syndicalism  and  the 

42 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

Panama  Exposition  at  the  other,  and  I  have 
used  many  words  in  saying  what  might  have 
been  expressed  in  a  sentence.  The  old  solidarity 
in  life  which  expressed  itself  for  four  thousand 
years  in  a  succession  of  quite  distinct,  but  al- 
ways sequent,  styles  died  out  at  last,  and  the 
new  individualism  of  pigeonhole  society  and 
personal  followings  came  in.  What  lies  before 
us?  More  pigeonholes,  more  personal  follow- 
ings, more  individualism,  with  anarchy  at  the 
end  ?  I  do  not  think  so,  but  rather  exactly  the 
reverse.  Architecture,  I  insist,  is  always  expres- 
sive; sometimes  it  reveals  metaphysical  and 
biological  truth,  when  in  itself  there  is  no  truth 
whatever.  If  we  built  Independence  Hall  in 
Philadelphia  there  was  something  in  us  of  the 
same  nature,  and  we  glory  in  the  fact.  If  we 
built  the  City  Hall  in  Philadelphia,  there  was 
something  in  us  like  that,  arresting  as  the 
thought  must  be.  If  we  are  doing  three  Classics, 
and  two  Gothics,  and  steel-frame,  and  Post- 
Impressionism  (not  to  mention  the  others)  at 
the  present  moment,  then  that  is  because  our 
nature  is  the  same.  Now,  can  we  again  prove 
the  truth  of  the  saying,  "Ex  pede  Herculem," 

43 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

and,  using  our  present  output  as  the  foot,  (I  ad- 
mit the  connotation  is  of  the  centipede) ,  create 
the  Hercules  ?  I  mean  can  we,  from  what  we  are 
doing  to-day,  predict  anything  of  the  future? 
Not  of  our  future  style ;  that  will  be  what  our 
society  makes  it;  but  of  society  itself?  For  my 
own  part,  I  think  we  can.  To  me  all  that  we  are 
doing  in  architecture  indicates  the  accuracy  of 
the  deduction  we  draw  from  myriad  other  mani- 
festations, that  we  are  at  the  end  of  an  epoch 
of  materialism,  rationalism,  and  intellectualism, 
and  at  the  beginning  of  a  wonderful  new  epoch, 
when  once  more  we  achieve  a  just  estimate  of 
comparative  values;  when  material  achieve- 
ment becomes  the  slave  again,  and  no  longer 
the  slave-driver;  when  spiritual  intuition  drives 
mere  intellect  back  into  its  proper  and  very  cir- 
cumscribed sphere;  and  when  religion,  at  the 
same  time  dogmatic,  sacramental,  and  mystic, 
becomes,  in  the  ancient  and  sounding  phrase, 
"One,  Holy,  Catholic,  and  Apostolic,"  and  as- 
sumes again  its  rightful  place  as  the  supreme 
element  in  life  and  thought,  the  golden  chain 
on  which  are  strung,  and  by  which  are  bound 
together,  the  varied  jewels  of  action. 

44 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

Everywhere,  and  at  the  very  moment  when 
our  material  activity  and  our  material  triumphs 
seem  to  threaten  the  high  stars,  appear  the  evi- 
dences that  this  wonderful  thing  is  coming  to 
pass,  and  architecture  adds  its  modicum  of 
proof.  What  else  does  it  mean,  that  on  every 
hand  men  now  demand  in  art  better  things  than 
ever  before,  and  get  them,  from  an  ever  increas- 
ing number  of  men,  whether  they  are  Pagans, 
Goths,  or  Vandals  ?  What  is  the  meaning  of  the 
return  to  Gothic,  not  only  in  form,  but  "in 
spirit  and  in  truth"?  Is  it  that  we  are  pleased 
with  its  forms  and  wearied  of  others?  Not  at 
all.  It  is  simply  this,  that  the  Renaissance- 
Reformation-Revolution  having  run  its  course, 
and  its  epoch  having  reached  its  appointed 
term,  we  go  back,  deliberately,  or  instinctively, 
—  back,  as  life  goes  back,  as  history  goes  back, 
to  restore  something  of  the  antecedent  epoch, 
to  win  again  something  we  had  lost,  to  return  to 
the  fork  in  the  roads,  to  gain  again  the  old 
lamps  we  credulously  bartered  for  new.  Men 
laugh  (or  did ;  I  think  they  have  given  it  over  of 
late)  at  what  they  call  the  reactionary  nature 
and  the  affectation  of  the  Gothic  restoration  of 

45 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

the  moment,  and  they  would  be  right  if  it  meant 
what  they  think  it  means.  Its  significance  is 
higher  than  their  estimate,  higher  than  the  con- 
scious impulses  of  those  who  are  furthering  the 
work,  for  back  of  it  all  lies  the  fact  that  what 
we  need  to-day  in  our  society,  in  the  State,  in 
the  Church,  is  precisely  what  we  abandoned 
when,  as  one  man,  we  arose  to  the  cry  of  the 
leaders  and  abettors  of  the  Renaissance.  We 
lost  much,  but  we  gained  much ;  now  the  time 
has  come  for  us  to  conserve  all  that  we  gained  of 
good,  slough  off  the  rest,  and  then  gather  up 
once  more  the  priceless  heritage  of  medievalism, 
so  long  disregarded. 

And  that  is  what  the  Gothic  restoration 
means,  a  returning  to  other  days  —  not  for  the 
retrieving  of  pleasant  but  forgotten  forms,  but 
for  the  recovery  of  those  impulses  in  life  which 
made  these  forms  inevitable.  Do  you  think 
the  Pugins  in  England  in  the  early  part  of 
the  nineteenth  century  chose  to  build  Gothic 
churches  because  they  liked  the  forms  better 
than  those  of  the  current  Classic  then  in  its  last 
estate  ?  Not  at  all,  or  at  all  events,  not  prima- 
rily ;  but  rather  because  they  passionately  loved 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

the  old  Catholic  religion  that  voiced  itself  in 
these  same  churches  they  took  as  their  models. 
And  the  same  is  true  of  those  of  us  who  build 
Gothic  churches  to-day :  instinctively  we  revolt 
from  the  strange  religion  that,  under  Medici 
and  Borgia,  built  the  Rococo  abominations  of 
Italy,  and  equally  from  that  other  religion  that 
found  adequate  self-expression  in  the  barren 
meeting-houses  of  Puritan  England  and  Amer- 
ica; and  when  again  we  try  to  restore  to  our 
colleges,  as  at  Princeton  and  the  University  of 
Pennsylvania  and  Chicago  and  Bryn  Mawr, 
something  of  the  wonderful  dynamic  architec- 
ture of  Oxford  and  Cambridge  and  Eton  and 
Winchester,  we  do  it  far  less  because  we  like  the 
style  better  than  that  —  or  rather  those  —  of 
Columbia  and  Harvard  and  Yale,  than  because 
we  are  impelled  to  our  course  by  an  instinctive 
mental  affiliation  with  the  impulses  behind  the 
older  art  and  with  the  cultural  and  educational 
principles  for  which  they  stand. 

I  want  to  emphasize  this  point  very  fully :  the 
Gothic  restoration  is  neither  a  fad  nor  a  case 
of  stylistic  predilections.  Of  course,~we  like  it 
better  than  any  of  the  others  to  which  we  have 

47 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

any  shadow  of  right,  and  we  think  it  better  art 
than  anything  the  Renaissance  ever  produced ; 
but  back  of  this  is  either  a  clear  conviction  or  a 
dim  instinct  (one  is  as  good  as  the  other  as  an 
incentive)  that  the  power  that  expressed  itself 
through  Gothic  forms  was  a  saner  and  more 
wholesome  and  altogether  nobler  thing  than 
that  which  expressed  itself  through  the  art  of 
the  Renaissance  and  all  that  has  succeeded  it. 
In  other  words,  the  world  is  coming  to  realize 
something  of  the  significances  of  art,  and  its 
import  as  human  language,  not  spoken,  —  for 
the  audible  tongue  has  its  own  function  of  ex- 
pressing mental  concepts,  —  but  conveying  its 
message  symbolically,  and  to  the  imagination, 
the  intuition  —  if  you  like,  to  the  soul. 

In  a  way  it  is  all  a  part  of  a  great  revolution, 
or  restoration,  that  is  even  now  taking  place, 
and  is  far  more  significant  than  many  of  the 
more  conspicuous  and  loudly  heralded  trans- 
formations with  which  the  century  is  rife,  a 
revolution  that  was  inevitable,  that  is  part  of 
the  great  rhythm  of  human  life  that  is  the 
underlying  force  of  history.  By  some  mysteri- 
ous law  this  vast  vibration  seems  to  divide  itself 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

into  epochs  of  about  five  centuries,  during  each 
of  which  a  tendency  initiated  in  the  preceding 
period  rises  to  the  surface,  submerges  its  pred- 
ecessor, lifts  on  an  enormous  swell,  crests,  — 
and  then  in  its  turn  breaks  down  and  disap- 
pears, giving  place  to  its  successor  whose 
inconspicuous  beginnings  have  already  been 
disclosed,  though  dimly.  In  this  great  rhythm 
there  are,  of  course,  periodical  nodes  which  are 
the  points  where  the  ascending  wave  passes 
that  which  is  descending,  and  these  nodes  come 
almost  exactly  at  five-hundred-year  intervals, 
before  and  following  the  Christian  era.  To 
speak  only  of  what  has  been  since  that  date,  we 
find  the  years  450  to  550,  950  to  1050,  and  1450 
to  1550  fraught  with  enormous  significance  and 
containing  within  their  span  those  sudden  and 
violent  activities  that  spelled  at  the  same  time 
the  death  of  one  epoch,  the  birth  of  another. 
Similarly  we  may  assume  that  at  least  from 
1950  on  we,  or  our  descendants,  shall  confront 
a  revolution  of  the  same  nature,  during  which 
what  we  now  call  "modern  civilization" 
(which  may  be  dated  roughly  from  the  fall  of 
Constantinople  in  1453)  will  dissolve  and  disap- 

49 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

pear  as  completely  as  the  Roman  Empire  van- 
ished at  the  first  node  after  the  birth  of  Christ, 
the  Carolingian  empire  at  the  second,  and 
medievalism  at  the  third ;  while  what  takes  its 
place  will  be  as  radically  different  as  happened 
in  each  of  these  historic  instances.  As  I  have 
said  before,  however,  the  antecedents  of  revo- 
lution and  re-creation  run  far  back  of  the  node 
itself,  and  as  at  the  cresting  of  mediaevalism  we 
may  find  in  Abelard  and  the  Albigenses,  and 
veiled  even  in  scholasticism,  the  seed  that  was 
not  to  germinate  for  many  generations,  so  now, 
although  the  great  convulsion  may  be  half  a 
century  away,  we  can,  if  we  look,  discover  the 
leaven  at  work  and  from  its  manifestations 
make  some  estimate  of  what  it  will  produce 
when  it  is  in  full  operation. 

Now  this  leaven  shows  itself  in  many  forms, 
and  the  revival  of  Gothic  architecture  is  one  of 
them.  It  is  a  wide  fellowship,  this  of  the  proph- 
ets, the  path-breakers :  if,  on  the  one  hand,  we 
find,  as  we  should  expect,  close  kin  in  all  the 
arts,  from  the  nineteenth-century  Romanticists 
in  literature  and  the  Pre-Raphaelites  and  the 
artist-craftsmen  of  Morris's  following,  and 

50 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

Richard  Wagner,  down  to  the  horde  of  lesser 
lights  to-day  in  literature  and  painting  and 
music  who  have  broken  away  from  the  classical- 
agnostic  type  of  the  latter  part  of  the  last  cen- 
tury and  are  returning  to  the  Catholic  Middle 
Ages  for  their  inspiration  and  their  models,  so, 
on  the  other,  do  we  find  an  infinity  of  move- 
ments of  similar  impulse  but  in  far-sundered 
fields :  socialism,  for  instance,  which  is  a  rather 
insecure  and  blundering  revolt  against  the  whole 
economic  theory  and  material  practice  of  the 
last  epoch  of  history ;  the  monastic  revival,  one 
of  the  most  significant  and  amazing  episodes  of 
the  present  day,  ignored  by  the  world,  yet 
forging  onward  year  after  year  with  a  vitality 
matched  only  in  the  seventh,  the  twelfth,  and 
the  seventeenth  centuries ;  radicalism  in  politics 
which,  however  stupid  it  may  be  in  its  passionate 
panaceas,  is  still  a  real  mediaeval  revolt  against 
the  impossible  governmental  system  engendered 
in  the  centuries  between  the  Renaissance  and 
our  own ;  the  new  literature  of  spiritual  dynam- 
ics with  Chesterton  and  Hilaire  Belloc  at  the 
head,  battling  gloriously  against  the  paynim  in 
the  shape  of  Bennett,  Wells,  and  their  kind  ; 

Si 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

the  new-old  religious  propaganda  of  such  men 
as  Fr.  Figgis,  Fr.  Waggett,  the  Abbot  of  Caldey, 
and  Fr.  McNabb,  withering  with  its  prophetic 
breath  the  plausible  and  ingenious  heresies  of  a 
Campbell,  a  Canon  Henson,  and  a  Mrs.  Eddy; 
finally,  —  though  there  is  much  unnamed  be- 
fore,—  the  new  philosophy,  James,  Eucken, 
Bergson, — the  last  the  greatest  figure,  perhaps, 
since  St.  Thomas  Aquinas. 

A  varied  list,  is  it  not?  And  much  still  re- 
mains unspecified ;  but  it  all  hangs  together ;  it  is 
all  part  of  a  great  movement;  and  the  most 
interesting  thing  is  the  fact  that  it  all  happens 
synchronously  with  the  very  culmination  of  its 
antithesis,  the  thing  it  is  destined  to  destroy, 
the  apotheosis  of  that  materialism  that  is  the 
essence  of  the  epoch  now  closing  in  triumphant 
glory,  in  war  and  anarchy,  and  in  the  despera- 
tion of  unrevealed  but  inevitable  defeat. 

And  here  is  a  point  worth  noting  and  that  may 
be  made  useful.  To-day  we  are  surrounded  by 
a  very  cyclone  of  reform :  from  the  four  winds 
of  heaven  we  are  battered  and  tempest-tossed 
by  hurtling  reforms  that  leave  us  no  peace  and 
—  it  must  be  confessed  —  afford  us  scant  bene- 

52 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

fit.  We  seize  them  all,  we  are  voracious  for 
reforms,  we  accept  them  at  their  face  value,  and 
—  again  to  change  the  simile — wolf  them  down 
like  one  o'clock.  The  result  is  usually  unfortu- 
nate, for  as  a  matter  of  fact  all  is  not  reform 
that  revolutionizes.  There  are  two  kinds  of 
reform,  the  first  that  is  protective,  preventive: 
reactions'  engendered  by  a  dying  force  to  save 
itself,  tangents  springing  from  a  falling  curve 
and  striving  to  arrest  the  inevitable  descent; 
the  second  that  engenders  tangents  that  leap 
upward  from  the  ascending  curve,  each  one  of 
which  actually  lifts  the  curve  more  lightly  into 
the  air.  At  this  moment  the  descending  and 
ascending  curves  cross,  the  tangential  reactions 
are  very  much  mixed,  and  no  wonder  helpless 
humanity  is  confused.  But  it  all  becomes  clear 
if  we  can  segregate  them  in  their  proper  cate- 
gories. Half  the  so-called  reforms  of  to-day, 
and  those  most  loudly  acclaimed  and  avidly 
accepted,  are  really  no  more  than  the  desperate 
efforts  of  a  dying  force  to  prolong  for  an  hour 
its  pitiful  existence,  to  postpone  for  a  day  its 
inevitable  plunge  into  the  sea  of  oblivion.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  other  half,  —  who  shall 

S3 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

estimate  its  vast  significance,  its  illimitable 
dynamic  force  ?  Under  its  varied  forms  lie  the 
promise  and  potency  of  a  new  era,  a  new  epoch 
of  civilization ;  and  I  honestly  think  the  great 
question  that  confronts  every  man  to-day,  and 
that  must  be  promptly  answered  is  "On  which 
wave  are  you  riding?"  If  on  that  whose  crest 
loomed  in  the  immediate  past,  then  you  are 
riding  down  the  swift  glissade  of  dissolution 
and  your  day  is  nearly  done ;  if  on  that  which 
only  lately  has  risen  out  of  the  dark,  then  before 
you  lifts  an  ascent  that  cannot  be  checked  and 
whose  cresting  is  perhaps  two  or  three  centuries 
ahead.  And  in  choosing  your  wave,  the  isola- 
tion of  reforms  in  the  two  categories  I  have 
named  will  be  of  assistance  towards  the  deter- 
mination; for,  once  accomplished,  you  will  see 
how  many  of  those  alluring  panaceas  that 
promise  well  are  but  the  eloquence  of  a  patent 
medicine  circular,  are  but  dregs  and  ashes,  while 
things  you  had  little  noted,  or  noted  with 
amused  contempt,  are  actually  those  centres  of 
vitality,  of  dynamic  force,  that  are  at  the  same 
time  the  guaranty  of  the  termination  of  a  dy- 
nasty become  corrupt  and  festering,  and  of  the 

54 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

initiation  of  another  that  shall  be  strong  with 
new  and  crescent  life. 

You  see?  I  told  you  the  word  "Gothic" 
would  lead  me  far:  farther  than  you  asked,  or 
will  like,  or  will  agree  to;  but  to  some  of  us  it 
is  like  an  oriflamme,  a  standard  set  up  by  the 
king  for  the  rallying  of  loyalty :  the  fiery  cross 
of  Constantine  with  its  prophetic  legend,  "  By 
this  sign  conquer!"  Whether  we  know  it  or 
not,  —  and  some  of  us  act  by  instinct  rather 
than  conviction, — we  are  fighting  the  battles  of 
a  new  civilization,  which,  like  all  true  civiliza- 
tion, is  also  the  old.  And  it  is  for  this  very  rea- 
son that,  unlike  our  forbears  of  the  beginnings 
of  the  crusade,  we  cannot  urge  our  Gothic  as 
either  a  universal  style,  fitted  for  all  conceiv- 
able purposes,  or  as  a  final  thing  which  consists 
in  the  restoration  and  perpetuation  of  a  mode 
of  art  sufficiently  determined  in  the  Middle 
Ages,  as  Greek,  for  example,  was  determined  in 
the  Hellenic  epoch.  Let  me  say  a  word  on  these 
two  points. 

The  argument — one  might  almost  say  the 
passionate  prayer  —  fora  "National  Style"  is 
based  on  an  insufficient  apprehension  of  the 

55 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

premises.  A  national  style  implies  unity  of 
civilization,  such,  for  instance,  as  happened 
in  the  fourth  century  B.C.,  the  fourth  cen- 
tury A.D.  in  the  Eastern  Empire,  or  the  thir- 
teenth century  throughout  Christian  Europe: 
such  a  condition  does  not  exist  to-day  —  is  as 
far  from  existence  as  then  it  was  near.  This 
twentieth  century  is  like  a  salad  dressing :  com- 
posed of  two  opposite  ingredients  which,  nev- 
ertheless, assembled  in  unstable  equilibrium, 
produce  a  most  interesting  and  even  useful 
condiment.  On  the  one  hand,  we  have  all  the 
amazing  precedents  of  the  last  four  centuries, 
from  materialism,  intellectualism,  atheism,  and 
democracy  to  "big  business,"  syndicalism,  and 
"  Votes  for  Women  " ;  on  the  other,  we  have  an 
inheritance  from  alien  and  far-distant  times: 
the  Home  (as  distinguished  from  the  uptown 
flat),  the  School  (when  it  has  not  surrendered  to 
manual,  vocational,  and  business  training),  and 
the  Church,  in  its  ancient  aspect,  untouched 
by  rationalism,  the  social  club  idea,  and  emo- 
tional insanity.  There  are  infinite  ramifications 
of  each  branch,  but  the  branches  are  distinct, 
and  like  a  trunk  grafted  with  apples  and  roses  (I 

56 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

believe  this  may  be  done),  the  flowers  are  differ- 
ent, and  the  fruit.  Now,  as  I  have  said  before 
(and  as  my  hour  prolongs  itself  more  strenuously 
maintain),  art  is  expressive,  the  highest  voicing 
of  the  highest  things,  and  if  it  has  two  opposites 
to  make  manifest  it  must  be  true  to  each  and 
express  them  in  different  ways.  I  do  not  know 
what  may  be  the  exact  and  perfect  architec- 
tural expressions  of  Wall  Street,  yellow  journal- 
ism, commercial  colleges,  the  Structural  Steel 
Union,  Christian  Science,  and  equal  suffrage :  I 
dare  say  they  are,  or  may  be  made,  as  beautiful 
as  Hellenic  or  Byzantine  or  Buddhist  architec- 
ture ;  but  I  am  reasonably  sure  they  are  not  like 
any  of  these,  and  I  am  firmly  persuaded  that 
they  cannot  be  Gothic  in  any  form.  On  the 
other  hand,  as  I  think  I  have  said  before,  I  am 
equally  sure  that  a  Christian  home,  a  con- 
scientious and  high-minded  ( university,  and 
the  Catholic  Faith  are  not  to  be  put  forward 
in  the  sight  of  men  clothed  in  the  Rococo  rai- 
ment of  a  Medici-Borgia  masquerade  or  the 
quaint  habiliments  of  the  Ecole  des  Beaux 
Arts. 

"  Every  man  to  his  taste,"  and  to  each  cate- 
57 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

gory  of  human  activity  its  own  stylistic  expres- 
sion, for  each  has  its  own  and  nothing  is  gained 
by  a  confusion  of  categories.  Because,  we  will 
say,  the  art  of  Imperial  Rome  best  expresses 
the  spirit  and  the  function  of  a  metropolitan 
railway  station,  it  does  not  follow  that  it  must 
also  be  used  for  the  library  of  a  great  univer- 
sity; because  the  soul  of  the  Ecole  des  Beaux 
Arts  as  made  manifest  through  the  apartment 
houses  of  the  Boulevard  Raspail,  must  also  in- 
spire the  material  form  of  the  town  house  of  a 
"Captain  of  Industry,"  it  need  not  inevitably 
perform  the  same  function  in  the  case  of  a 
cathedral ;  because  Gothic  of  some  sort  or  other 
best  reveals  the  lineage,  the  impulse,  and  the 
law  of  an  Episcopal  parish  church,  we  are  not 
compelled  to  postulate  it  for  a  stock  exchange 
or  a  department  store.  In  fact,  the  very  reverse 
is  true  in  all  these  instances,  and  those  who  are 
most  zealous  in  urging  the  cause  of  Gothic  for 
church  and  school  and  home  are  also  most  jeal- 
ous of  its  employment  elsewhere ;  for  they  know 
that  only  those  elements  in  modern  civilization 
which  still  retain  something  of  the  spirit  that 
informed  their  immediate  forbears  -in  the  Mid- 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

die  Ages  have  any  right  to  the  forms  that  spirit 
created  for  its  own  self-expression. 

And  now,  just  a  word  as  to  these  forms  them- 
selves, lest  you  should  think,  as  others  have, 
that  the  Gothic  restoration  aims  not  only  at 
universal  sovereignty,  but  that  it  is  content  as 
well  with  the  restoration  as  such,  aiming  to 
bring  back  in  all  its  integrity  both  a  dead 
civilization  and  its  forms.  Such  an  idea  would 
be  far  from  the  facts ;  it  is  true  that  at  present 
those  that  are  engaged  in  the  Gothic  restoration 
seldom  diverge  very  far  from  historical  methods 
and  forms.  Perhaps  the  late  J.  D.  Sedding,  and 
George  Scott,  architect  for  Liverpool  Cathe- 
dral, and  Leonard  Stokes,  sometime  president 
of  the  Royal  Institute,  diverge  farther  in  this 
direction;  but  even  they  venture  but  a  little 
way  into  untrodden  paths,  while  the  great 
majority  of  practitioners,  such  as  the  late 
George  Bodley  in  England,  and  Vaughan  in 
America,  adhere  very  closely,  indeed,  to  what 
has  been,  adapting  it  rather  than  transforming 
it.  This  is  not  because  there  is  anything  sacro- 
sanct in  these  forms  and  methods,  it  is  not  be- 
cause, as  individuals,  the  men  I  have  named 

59 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

lack  either  inspiration  or  power  of  invention; 
it  is  simply  because,  in  the  first  place,  they  know 
that  man  must  not  only  destroy  but  restore 
before  he  can  rebuild,  and,  in  the  second  place, 
because  they  lack  the  great  push  behind  them 
of  a  popular  uprising,  the  incentive  of  a  univer- 
sal demand,  which  alone  can  make  individual- 
ism creative  rather  than  destructive,  dynamic 
rather  than  anarchical.  This  is  a  fact  that  is 
frequently  forgotten  in  categories  of  activity 
other  than  those  purely  aesthetic,  and  if  in 
economics,  politics,  and  philosophy  men  would 
realize  its  truth,  we  should  less  often  be  threat- 
ened by  plausible  reforms  that  are  actually 
deformatory  in  their  character.  However  this 
may  be,  it  is  certainly  so  in  architecture,  and, 
therefore,  we  are  content  at  present  to  restore ; 
for  we  know  that  by  so  doing  not  only  do  we 
regain  a  body  of  laws,  precedents,  and  forms 
that  are  the  only  foundation  for  the  superstruc- 
ture of  which  we  dream,  but  also  because 
through  these  very  qualities  we  may,  in  a  meas- 
ure, establish  and  make  operative  again,  by 
analogy  and  suggestion,  those  stimuli  that  in 
time  may  react  on  society  itself,  transforming  it 

60 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

into  a  new  estate,  when  man  will  enter  into  the 
new  spiritual  life  which  will  demand  a  creative 
and  revealing  art,  such  as  that  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  and  in  accordance  with  law  this  demand 
will  guarantee  the  supply. 

For  art  of  all  sorts  is  not  only  expressive,  it  is 
also  creative :  if  it  is  in  one  sense  the  flower  of  a 
civilization,  it  is  in  another  the  fruit,  and  in  its 
burgeoning  lies  also  the  promise  of  a  new  life 
after  the  winter  of  the  declining  curve  is  past 
and  the  new  line  begins  its  ascending  course. 
Bad  art  —  for  there  is  such,  though  it  is  a  con- 
tradiction in  terms — works  powerfully  for  bad 
living  and  bad  thinking,  while,  on  the  other 
hand,  good  art  is  in  its  very  nature  regenera- 
tive and  beneficent.  It  cannot  save  the  age  of 
which  it  is  the  flower  from  inevitable  decay, 
but,  even  as  the  treasures  of  classical  civiliza- 
tion were  preserved  in  the  monasteries  of  the 
Dark  Ages  until  better  days,  so  does  it  lie  fal- 
low for  generations  only  to  rise  again  into  the 
light  for  the  inception  of  a  new  civilization. 

This,  then,  is  the  significance  of  the  contem- 
porary Gothic  restoration,  and  we  who  believe 
in  it,  who  give  it  our  most  earnest  support,  do 

61 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

so  less  as  artists  than  as  missionaries,  confident 
that  if  we  can  bring  it  back,  even  at  first  on  the 
old  lines,  we  shall  have  been  working  in  the  serv- 
ice of  humanity. 

Shall  we  rest  there  ?  Shall  we  restore  a  style, 
and  a  way  of  life,  and  a  mode  of  thought  ?  Shall 
we  re-create  an  amorphous  medievalism  and 
live  listlessly  in  that  fool's  paradise  ?  On  the  con- 
trary. When  a  man  finds  himself  confronting  a 
narrow  stream,  with  no  bridge  in  sight,  does  he 
leap  convulsively  on  the  very  brink  and  then 
project  himself  into  space  ?  If  he  does  he  is  very 
apt  to  fail  of  his  immediate  object,  which  is  to 
get  across.  No;  he  retraces  his  steps,  gains  his 
running  start,  and  clears  the  obstacle  at  a 
bound.  This  is  what  we  architects  are  doing 
when  we  fall  back  on  the  great  past  for  our 
inspiration ;  this  is  what,  specifically,  the  Goth- 
icists  are  particularly  doing.  We  are  getting  our 
running  start,  we  are  retracing  our  steps  to  the 
great  Christian  Middle  Ages,  not  that  there  we 
may  remain,  but  that  we  may  achieve  an  ade- 
quate point  of  departure;  what  follows  must 
take  care  of  itself. 

And,  by  your  leave,  in  following  this  course 
62 


THE  GOTHIC  RESTORATION 

we  are  not  alone,  we  have  life  with  us;  for  at 
last  life  also  is  going  backward,  back  to  gather 
up  the  golden  apples  lost  in  the  wild  race  for 
prizes  of  another  sort,  back  for  its  running  start, 
that  it  may  clear  the  crevasse  that  startlingly 
has  opened  before  it.  Beyond  this  chasm  lies  a 
new  field,  and  a  fair  field,  and  it  is  ours  if  we 
will.  The  night  has  darkened,  but  lightened 
toward  dawn ;  there  is  silver  on  the  edges  of  the 
hills  and  promise  of  a  new  day,  not  only  for 
architects,  but  for  every  man. 


Ill 

THE    PLACE    OF    THE    FINE    ARTS    IN 
PUBLIC    EDUCATION 


Ill 

THE    PLACE    OF    THE    FINE    ARTS    IN 
PUBLIC    EDUCATION  l 

AS  the  strange  madness  we  call  the  Renais- 
sance prevailed  increasingly  over  Europe, 
blotting  out  the  last  faint  flickerings  of  that 
artistic  fire  that  had  been  a  lamp  to  the  feet 
of  innumerable  generations,  and  substituting 
therefor  the  pale  ignis-fatuus  of  conscious  and 
scholastic  artifice,  synchronously  grew  an  origi- 
nal and  hitherto  unheard-of  theory  of  the  nature 
and  function  of  the  fine  arts,  carrying  with  it  the 
novel  and  alien  idea  of  concrete,  specific,  pre- 
meditated "art  education."  A  new  thing,  in- 
deed, as  though  one  should  establish  schools  of 
gastronomy,  lectureships  on  the  art  of  sleep, 
academies  of  inhalation  and  exhalation.  Novel, 
yes;  but  imperative  both  then  and  now,  owing 
necessity,  however,  not  to  a  more  liberal  and 
enlightened  conception  of  art  in  itself,  but 

1  Read  at  Commencement,  Yale  University  School  of 
Fine  Arts. 

67 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

rather  to  the  ominous  and  most  unwholesome 
revolution  that,  in  the  tempest  of  change,  had 
hurled  from  their  enduring  pedestals  the  proven 
laws  of  life,  substituting  in  their  place  the 
brazen  images  of  a  dumb  idolatry;  robbing 
man  of  his  divine  birthright  in  beauty,  the  her- 
itage of  ages  unnumbered,  the  indelible  mark 
and  token  of  God  in  His  world. 

When  the  great  epoch  of  paganism  crumbled 
and  sunk  into  dust  and  ashes,  tried  and  found 
wanting  by  the  touchstone  of  divine  revelation, 
St.  Benedict  was  raised  up  for  the  founding  of  a 
new  institution,  based  on  the  stern  rejection  of 
the  dearest  privileges  of  man,  but,  because  of 
this  very  rejection  and  denial,  competent  to 
meet  in  the  highest  degree  the  desperate  needs 
of  a  racked  and  shattered  era.  But  for  the 
monks  in  their  hidden  monasteries,  the  very 
seed  of  civilization  would  have  perished  from 
the  earth;  and  so  we  may  say  with  equal  truth 
that,  however  false  the  new  view  of  art,  how- 
ever unwholesome  the  new  idea  of  premeditated 
art  education,  but  for  these  same  schools  of  art, 
from  the  days  of  the  Medici  until  now,  the 
world  would  have  lost  that  which  was  even  of 

68 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

greater  value  than  the  Greek  and  Roman  manu- 
scripts and  the  dim  traditions  of  perished  glory, 
that  lay  for  centuries  in  monkish  cloisters  and 
in  monkish  hearts. 

But  the  pious  conserving  of  shards  and  shreds 
is  not  all,  and  with  the  mediaeval  monks  in  their 
first  estate,  we  have  sometimes  been  content 
with  such  conservation,  forgetting  that  some- 
thing lies  behind,  and  that,  the  inner  meaning 
of  the  stores  in  our  treasure-house ;  their  func- 
tion, their  message,  their  significance. 

Nothing  else,  indeed,  would  have  been  pos- 
sible, for  with  the  Renaissance  came  into  the 
world  a  new  theory  of  art:  and  this  was  that, 
instead  of  being  what  it  is,  the  touchstone  of 
civilization,  it  was  simply  an  amenity  of  life,  a 
conscious  product,  and  a  marketable  commod- 
ity. This  novel  idea  has  persisted  until  to-day, 
and  the  result  is  that  the  real  nature  of  art  has 
remained  forgotten,  and  in  spite  of  the  protests 
of  the  artist  and  of  the  teacher,  we  have  per- 
sisted in  regarding  our  art  schools  much  as  we 
do  our  "commercial  colleges"  and  our  schools 
of  applied  science;  that  is,  as  agencies' of  special- 
ization maintained  for  the  benefit  of  those  who, 

69 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

by  their  mental  temper,  are  biased  in  favour  of 
architecture  or  painting  or  the  industrial  arts, 
on  the  one  hand,  or  of  bookkeeping,  stenog- 
raphy, mechanical  engineering,  on  the  other. 
This  is  to  miss  the  entire  significance  of  art  and 
to  relegate  it  to  a  position  where  it  is  mean- 
ingless, impotent,  dead.  We  study  Greek  and 
Latin,  history,  literature,  philosophy,  mathe- 
matics, not,  primarily,  that  we  may  become 
specialists  in  the  use  of  one  or  the  other,  at  a 
given  rate  of  pecuniary  compensation,  but  that 
we  may  become  cultivated  men,  and  this  should 
be  our  attitude  toward  the  fine  arts ;  for  the  day 
is  not  far  distant  when  the  school  of  art  will  be, 
not  an  accessory  or  an  adjunct  to  a  university, 
as  is  the  school  of  mines  or  the  dental  school, 
but  as  absolutely  and  intimately  a  part  of  its 
prescribed  curriculum  as  the  ancient  languages 
or  philosophy  or  letters. 

Art  is,  I  repeat,  neither  an  industry  nor  a 
product ;  it  is  a  mystery,  a  manifestation,  and  a 
result.  Through  it  alone  we  come  face  to  face 
with  the  spiritual  output  of  the  racial  soul, 
through  it  is  revealed  all  that  endures  in  civili- 
zation. I  claim  for  it,  therefore,  a  coordinate 

70 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

position  with  all  other  branches  of  learning,  as 
indispensable  in  a  complete  curriculum,  since 
it  is  at  the  same  time  inerrant  as  a  record  of 
achievement,  inspiring  toward  effective  action 
to  a  degree  unmatched  in  other  categories,  and 
finally,  a  great  language  for  the  voicing  of  the 
greatest  things,  a  language  for  which  there  is  no 
substitute,  and  he  who  is  not  learned  therein, 
either  in  its  active  or  its  passive  aspect,  is  to 
that  extent  ignorant,  unlearned,  uncultured. 

Art  is  the  revelation  of  the  human  soul,  not  a 
by-product  of  industrialism. 

During  the  great  period  of  Christian  civiliza- 
tion, this  truth  was  held  universally;  not  con- 
sciously, of  course,  nor  as  the  outcome  of  a 
scientific  demonstration;  the  Christian  centu- 
ries worked  after  another  method.  To  the  sane 
men  of  medievalism  there  were  two  categories 
of  phenomena :  axioms  and  mysteries ;  and  the 
frontiers  of  the  two  domains  were  fixed  and 
final.  Very  fortunately  for  the  future,  the  mys- 
teries were  themselves  held  to  be  axiomatic, 
and  so  long  as  this  was  true  a  just  balance  ex- 
isted in  life.  It  was  not  until  the  daimon  of  a 
haunting  paganism  rose  from  the  tomb  of  a 

71 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

dead  past,  bringing  the  bright  fruit  of  the  tree 
of  knowledge  in  its  hands,  and  on  its  lips  the 
words  the  serpent  had  said  before, "  Eat  thereof, 
then  your  eyes  shall  be  opened  and  ye  shall  be 
as  gods,  knowing  good  and  evil, "  —  it  was  not 
until  then,  the  fruit  eaten,  that  man  swelled  in 
pride  and  said,  "  Behold,  there  is  no  mystery," 
and  the  victory  of  the  Renaissance  was  accom- 
plished. 

As  the  nineteenth  century  takes  its  place  in 
history,  we  obtain  a  certain  effect  of  perspec- 
tive and  we  see  how  wholly  it  was  meshed  in 
that  web  of  futility  and  error,  "There  is  no 
mystery."  Truly,  to  us  of  the  new  century  it 
begins  to  seem  that  nothing  else  rightly  exists. 
At  all  events,  we  realize  that  the  things  of 
worth  and  moment  are  the  mysteries;  the 
things  of  indifference  the  demonstrable  facts. 
So  medievalism  held  art ;  a  thing  universal  and 
inevitable;  inseparable  from  life  and  bound  up 
in  the  being  of  every  man ;  but  a  thing  so  potent, 
so  sovereign,  and  in  its  effects  so  dispropor- 
tioned  to  its  palpable  means,  that  it  became  one 
with  all  the  other  inexplicable  potencies  —  a 
mystery. 

72 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

Now,  it  is  a  curious  fact  that  when  we  come 
to  understand  a  thing  finally  and  explicitly,  we 
are  unable  to  use  it  to  our  spiritual  advantage, 
or  to  the  ultimate  welfare  of  the  race.  Here  lies 
the  most  serious  stigma  upon  the  last  century, 
which  was  so  given  over  to  the  inordinate  man- 
ufacturing of  the  most  exquisite  and  technically 
faultless  theories,  devices,  and  machines  for 
the  production  of  quite  useless  institutions  and 
commodities.  The  phenomenon  we  accept  but 
cannot  comprehend ;  the  looming  wonder  that 
compels  us  but  eludes  hand  and  brain  forever; 
—  this  is  the  momentous  thing,  the  driving 
impulse  of  all  that  splendid  spiritual  and  in- 
tellectual activity  that,  through  its  immortal 
products,  endures  eternally  as  the  ever-grow- 
ing heritage  of  man.  Where  knowledge  ceases, 
mystery  begins,  and  the  better  part  of  man 
never  emerges  from  those  cloud  confines  where 
amid  the  lightning  and  the  tempest  God  is  seen 
face  to  face ;  that  magical  castle  of  cloud  and 
mist  across  whose  dim  portals  the  rainbow 
writes,  "Knowledge  abandon,  ye  who  enter 
here." 

This  revelation  of  the  eternal,  impassable 
73 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

limitation  of  human  knowledge,  combined  with 
that  other  which  is  its  perfect  compensation, 
the  doctrine  that  all  things  are  sacramental, 
possessing  an  "inward  and  spiritual  grace"  that 
is  apprehended  through  the  "outward  and  vis- 
ible sign,"  was  and  is  the  essential  element  in 
Christianity  which  made  it  victor  over  the  pa- 
ganism that  believed  all  things  were  possible 
to  the  human  mind.  So  mediaevalism  held,  and 
holding  brought  into  being  St.  Thomas  Aquinas 
and  St.  Francis,  Dante  and  Giotto  and  Fra 
Angelico ;  the  cathedral  builders  of  France  and 
the  abbey  builders  of  England.  For  the  two  es- 
sential truths  in  the  world  are  religion  and  art, 
and  these  two  are  mysteries;  rationalize  them 
and  they  cease,  for  their  motive  power  is  gone. 
Of  this  rationalizing,  of  this  Pandora's  quest 
for  the  facts  in  the  case,  there  was  nothing,  and, 
therefore,  misled  in  no  degree  as  to  the  sup- 
posed existence  of  a  science  either  of  religion  or 
of  art,  mediaevalism  raised  both  to  the  highest 
point  yet  attained  by  man. 

With  the  outbreak  of  the  Renaissance  came 
the  catastrophe,  for  behind  the  recrudescent 
pagan  forms,  behind  the  cry  of  humanism  and 

74 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

emancipation,  lay  the  old  pagan  theory  that  to 
human  reason  all  things  are  possible.  Mystery 
was  abolished  by  edict,  and  the  "  light  of  pure 
reason"  took  its  place,  though  three  centuries 
and  more  were  necessary  wholly  to  effect  the 
substitution.  Little  by  little  the  Renaissance 
modulated  into  the  Reformation,  and  this  in 
its  turn  merged  in  the  Revolution.  Each  of 
these  several  aspects  of  one  primary  impulse 
played  its  own  necessary  part  in  the  great 
breaking-up  of  the  just  and  well-balanced  order 
Christianity  had  brought  into  being.  The  Re- 
naissance of  Borgia  and  Medici  destroyed  the 
whole  system  of  natural  morality  and  made  for 
the  moment  the  Church  herself  a  stench  to  the 
nostrils  and  a  scandal.  The  Protestantism  of 
Luther  and  Calvin,  frantic  against  the  flagrant 
immorality  raging  like  a  pestilence  around  the 
very  throne  of  St.  Peter,  turned,  the  ethical 
regeneration  inaugurated,  into  a  propaganda 
for  the  substitution,  in  place  of  the  wonder  and 
the  mysticism  of  the  Catholic  Faith,  of  hard, 
mechanical,  logical,  and  literal  dogmas;  easily 
framed  in  words,  clearly  demonstrable  to  the 
most  cloudy  mental  faculties.  Finally,  the  Rev- 

75 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

olution  came  to  deny  everything:  Catholic, 
Renaissance,  Protestant  alike;  law  and  order, 
obedience,  honour,  even  the  palpable  decencies 
of  life;  one  thing  only  it  did  not  deny,  the  basic 
principle  of  the  Renaissance,  "There  is  no 
mystery."  Then  the  Revolution  passed  like  a 
paralyzing  nightmare,  leaving  the  field  swept 
clear  of  all  that  Christianity  had  brought  into 
existence,  and  since  then  we  have  been  per- 
mitted year  by  year  to  watch  the  unshackled, 
untrammelled  mind  struggling  to  build  a  new 
heaven  and  a  new  earth  over  the  ruins  of  the  old. 
Now  the  reaction  comes,  and  the  gray  dawn 
that  glimmered  fitfully  through  the  storm 
wrack  of  the  nineteenth  century  brightens  to 
another  day.  The  light  falls  on  every  domain 
of  life,  shining  through  the  still  buffeting 
storm;  on  industry,  economics,  philosophy, 
ethics,  politics,  education,  letters,  religion;  but 
nowhere  does  it  lie  with  a  kindlier  radiance  than 
on  the  great  domain  of  art.  It  is  not  alone  that 
once  more  man  clamours  for  beauty  and  its 
ministry,  and  men  rise  up  to  answer  the  demand 
in  kind:  beyond  this  lies  the  fact  that  the  old 
dogmas  no  longer  hold;  and  the  question  goes 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

forth,  "What  is  art,  what  does  it  signify,  what 
are  the  laws  of  its  causation?"  Everywhere 
men  are  searching  the  answer,  poring  over  the 
art  records  of  the  past  that  the  great  cataclysm 
has  left  us,  comparing  them  with  the  times  that 
brought  them  forth,  testing  these  times  again 
by  the  spirit  that  led  them,  building  up  by  slow 
degrees  a  new  biology  that  is  in  very  fact  the 
science  of  civilization. 

In  the  process  strange  things  are  revealed; 
no  longer  bound  by  inherited  prejudice,  and 
not  wholly  in  bondage  now  to  the  intellectual 
superstitions  of  the  period  of  modern  enlighten- 
ment, while  acquiring  a  measure  of  Christian 
humility  in  the  matter  of  the  omnipotence  of 
mentality,  we  go  back  to  the  original  records, 
draw  our  own  independent  inferences,  and, 
comparing  these  with  long  accepted  authori- 
ties, discover  that  the  deductions  and  conclu- 
sions that  served  for  past  generations  satisfy  us 
no  longer.  Are  we  right  in  thinking  it  all  a  sys- 
tem of  specious  special  pleading,  this  mass  of 
august  testimony  to  the  essential  barbarism  of 
Christian  civilization  and  to  the  essential  glory 
of  the  threefold  epoch  that  took  its  place  ?  To 

77 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

such  a  new  conclusion  we  tend  beyond  a  doubt ; 
and  while  we  still  admit  the  great  necessity  of 
many  post-mediaeval  principles  and  motives, 
we  are  coming  to  believe  that  these  developed 
through  the  Renaissance,  the  Reformation,  and 
the  Revolution,  not  by  reason  of  them ;  while 
each  has  left  us,  on  the  other  hand,  a  heritage 
of  evil  to  the  extinction  of  which  the  present 
century  is  consecrated. 

It  would  be  a  facile  task  and  fascinating  to 
examine,  one  by  one,  the  several  categories  of 
contemporary  spiritual,  mental,  and  physical 
activity,  pointing  out  in  each  how  the  evil  as- 
pects, that  force  themselves  on  us  with  such  in- 
sistency to-day,  hark  back  inevitably  to  one  or 
the  other  of  the  three  allied  dominations  that 
controlled  the  destinies  of  the  world  from  the 
exile  of  the  Popes  at  Avignon  to  the  battle  of 
Waterloo.  It  is  sufficient  for  the  moment  for  us 
to  deal  only  with  the  question  of  the  fine  arts, 
since  my  object  in  speaking  to  you  is  to  draw 
your  attention  to  certain  aspects  of  the  question 
of  the  place  the  study  of  the  philosophy  and 
history  of  art  should  have  in  the  scheme  of 
liberal  education. 

78 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

Before  all  else,  however,  we  must  disabuse 
our  minds  of  that  idea  of  the  nature  of  art  which 
has  maintained  itself  so  firmly  during  the  last 
four  centuries.  Art  is  not  a  possibly  desirable 
amenity  of  life,  to  be  acquired  as  a  gloss  to  a 
commercial  and  industrial  supremacy;  neither 
is  it  a  series  of  highly  specialized  professions. 
Art  is  a  result,  not  a  product;  and  it  is  also  a 
language.  Given  a  certain  degree  of  individual 
or  racial  or  national  civilization  and  the  in- 
evitable reaction  is  art  in  the  abstract.  The 
demand  for  expression  is  instant  and,  under  the 
same  civilized  conditions,  the  manifestation  is 
immediate  and  instinctive,  and  this  is  art  in 
the  concrete.  Art  is,  therefore,  a  language,  but 
it  deals  with  emotions,  concepts,  and  impulses 
that  cannot  be  expressed  through  any  other 
medium  known  to  man,  because  these  emotions, 
concepts,  and  impulses  are  the  highest,  and 
therefore  the  most  mysterious  and  tenuous,  of 
which  the  soul  has  cognition.  "There  is  a  phys- 
ical body  and  a  spiritual  body";  and  so  also 
there  is  a  physical  mind  and  a  spiritual  mind. 
The  former  deals  with  all  that  lies  between  the 
cradle  and  the  grave,  the  latter  with  the  treas- 

79 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

ured  consciousness  of  the  innumerable  aeons 
of  life  that  preceded  this  little  hour  of  earthly 
habitation,  and  with  the  innumerable  aeons 
that  shall  succeed.  Natural  science  is  the  con- 
crete manifestation  of  the  first,  religion  of  the 
second,  and  art  in  all  its  forms  is  the  perfect 
manifestation  of  this  spiritual  mind,  as  the 
written  and  spoken  language  is  the  voicing  of 
the  physical  mind  until,  indeed,  it  takes  upon 
itself  symbolical  quality,  when  it  becomes  one 
with  the  fine  arts  and  consecrated  to  other  serv- 
ice. 

Art,  then,  is  language  and  its  mode  is  symbol- 
ism, and  the  thing  that  lies  behind  is  the  es- 
sential man  in  his  highest  estate. 

As  we  became  more  and  more  ignorant  of  the 
very  meaning  of  the  word,  we,  as  children  of 
the  Renaissance,  slowly  and  arduously  evolved 
the  nineteenth-century  theory  of  art  which,  even 
more  than  the  Renaissance  and  the  Reforma- 
tion, was  instrumental  in  stamping  out  the  last 
smouldering  embers  of  the  thing  itself.  Where 
once  art  had  been  as  natural  and  inevitable  an 
attribute  of  man  as  religion  or  love  or  war  or 
children,  it  now  found  itself  an  exotic,  an  ap- 

80 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

panage  of  the  elect  few,  a  thing  too  tenuous  and 
aloof  for  common  humanity.  Such  a  theory 
as  this  means  simply  the  extinction  of  art, 
which  cannot  live  in  the  thin  air  of  Brahmini- 
cal  exclusiveness ;  it  is  the  exact,  the  instant, 
and  the  complete  language  of  man  in  his  spirit- 
ual experiences ;  and  while  to  only  one  in  a  thou- 
sand is  it  given  now,  or  ever  was  given,  to 
become  a  creative  artist,  behind  such  a  one  lies 
the  clamouring  world  of  men,  and  it  is  this  that 
manifests  itself  through  his  art,  not  his  own 
solitary  soul.  If,  like  Phidias,  Sophocles,  Dante, 
Giotto,  Shakespeare,  Wagner,  Browning,  he  is 
a  true  and  faithful  interpreter  of  the  best,  the 
race  answers  instantly,  unless  it  has  lost  or 
stultified  this  sixth  and  highest  sense,  as  has 
happened  in  history  only  in  modern  times.  To 
bring  back  this  marvellous  gift  of  God  to  a 
hungry  generation,  to  win  again  the  old  lamps 
foolishly  bartered  for  new,  —  the  old  lamps 
that,  at  a  touch,  brought  genii  and  afrits  and 
all  the  magical  spirits  of  fire  and  air  to  the  serv- 
ice of  the  summoner,  —  this  is  the  task  before 
us.  And  the  labour  is  not,  as  the  amateurs  and 
savants  and  literati  of  the  Renaissance,  or  the 

81 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

aesthetes  of  the  nineteenth-century  decadence 
would  have  held,  because  it  is  a  polite  accom- 
plishment and  a  facile  means  of  class  distinc- 
tion, but  because  it  is  the  immutable  mark  of 
civilization,  the  infallible  touchstone  of  human 
achievement.  Art  means  civilization,  the  lack 
of  it  barbarism,  and  year  by  year,  in  spite  of 
splendid  sporadic  manifestations,  this  lack  has 
become  ever  more  and  more  marked  since  the 
middle  of  the  fourteenth  century,  when  the  old 
lamps  were  sold  for  the  new. 

Now,  it  is  quite  clear  that  to  endeavour  to 
foster  the  passion  for  beauty  and  the  instinct  for 
art,  by  the  deliberate  and  scientific  methods 
that  have  held  for  some  five  centuries,  is  to  con- 
tinue our  self-indulgence  in  the  vain  repetition 
of  history.  By  taking  thought  we  cannot  add 
one  cubit  to  our  stature,  devise  a  new  religion 
(though  of  late  some  have  thought  otherwise), 
or  re-create  art.  We  can  do  many  things,  but 
none  of  these.  Art  is  the  result  of  certain  condi- 
tions: bring  these  into  being,  and  you  cannot 
escape  great  art ;  eliminate  them,  and  no  power 
on  earth  can  make  art  live.  For  five  centuries  we 
have  been  bending  all  our  energies  toward  the 

82 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

extinction  of  these  conditions,  and  the  success 
that  has  followed  has  been  very  considerable. 
If  we  desire  a  vital  art  we  must  reverse  our  pol- 
icy. Art  cannot  exist  side  by  side  with  atheism, 
agnosticism,  or  infidelity;  it  is  impossible  in 
conjunction  with  our  contemporary  conception 
of  what  constitutes  democracy :  it  dies  before 
defiance  of  law  and  order  and  denial  of  the 
principle  of  subservience  to  authority;  before 
the  individualism  of  the  nineteenth  century 
and  contemporary  standards  of  caste;  it  is 
trampled  to  death  in  the  economic  and  indus- 
trial Armageddon  that  surges  over  the  stricken 
field  of  contemporary  life.  In  a  word,  the  evils 
of  the  Renaissance-Reformation-Revolution, 
which  for  the  moment  are  somewhat  more  con- 
spicuous in  their  activity  than  the  virtues,  are 
the  negation  of  art-producing  conditions. 

We  may  put  to  one  side  the  thought  of  a  con- 
scious propaganda  for  the  restoration  of  art, 
devoting  ourselves  to  the  achievement  of  art- 
producing  conditions,  the  solving  of  the  re- 
ligious, governmental,  economic,  industrial,  and 
social  problems  that  confront  us,  like  the  solid 
ranks  of  a  conquering  army.  If  we  solve 

83 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

them  aright,  art  follows  as  the  guerdon  of 
victory. 

And  here  emerges  from  the  mist  of  theory  the 
new  doctrine  of  the  importance  of  the  fine  arts 
in  every  scheme  of  liberal  education.  I  am  not 
speaking  now  of  the  creative  artist  or  of  the 
manner  of  his  education ;  indeed,  I  am  not  sure 
that  to  him  education  is  a  necessity,  or  that  by 
such  methods  can  he  be  created.  He  will  occur, 
however  unfavourable  the  conditions  or  incle- 
ment and  forbidding  the  time.  The  question 
before  us  is  the  place  of  the  fine  arts  in  general 
education,  in  their  function  as  contributors  to 
the  making  of  a  well-founded  man.  Now,  in 
the  process  of  development,  we  have  reached  a 
point  where  we  no  longer  sound  the  tocsin, 
plant  the  standard  of  battle,  build  barricades 
in  city  streets,  and  go  forth  killing  and,  if  it 
may  be,  to  conquer.  We  have  another  way,  we 
teach ;  substituting  education  for  coercion,  and 
until  the  event  dethrones  our  theory,  we  shall 
believe  the  way  a  better  one,  and  that  by  our 
schools  and  colleges  and  universities  we  shall 
build  such  character  as  will  restore  those  just 
and  wholesome  conditions  that  will  express 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

themselves  through  that  great  paean  of  joy  and 
exultation  and  worship  we  call  art. 

There  are  certain  schemes  of  education  that 
tend  inevitably  to  this  end;  there  are  others 
that  work  as  inevitably  against  it.  Art-pro- 
ducing civilization  is  engendered  by  educational 
systems  that  are  conceived  on  the  lines  of  eter- 
nal truth,  not  on  those  of  time-serving  expedi- 
ency. During  the  nineteenth  century  a  new 
theory  came  into  vogue,  the  theory,  novel  and 
without  recognizable  ancestry,  that  the  object 
of  education  is  the  breeding  of  specialists, 
whether  they  be  dental  surgeons  or  bacteriolo- 
gists, bankers,  or  veterinarians ;  and  that,  to  this 
end,  everything  not  conspicuously  contributory 
to  intensified  specialization  should  be  elimin- 
ated ;  that  the  years  given  to  education  should 
be  shortened,  and  again  shortened,  in  order  that 
a  man  might  the  sooner  hurl  himself  into  the 
struggle  for  life.  From  this  point  of  view  every- 
thing not  obviously  practical  was  discredited : 
Latin  and  Greek  became  matters  of  indifference 
when  'an  electrician  or  a  financier  was  in  the 
making;  the  history  of  civilization,  the  develop- 
ment of  organized  religion,  comparative  litera- 

85 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

ture,  philosophy,  were  eliminated  from  the  edu- 
cation of  the  architect  and  the  engineer.  That 
the  result  was  a  great  body  of  men  of  unbal- 
anced intellect  and  very  flimsy  culture  is,  I 
think,  a  statement  that  may  be  defended,  and 
the  present  century,  even  in  its  extreme  youth, 
gives  evidence  of  a  radical  revolt  from  the  once 
popular  standards  of  its  predecessor.  A  new 
principle  has  come,  —  or  rather  an  old  princi- 
ple has  been  restored ;  and  we  confront  the  def- 
inite dogma  that  specialization  is  almost  wholly 
a  matter  for  post-graduate  education,  while 
the  object  of  the  school  and  the  college  and 
the  university  is  above  all  else  the  develop- 
ment of  gentlemen  of  well-rounded  personali- 
ties, who,  grounded  and  fixed  in  all  that  pertains 
to  general  culture,  rendered  conversant  with  all 
the  civilization  of  the  past  and  its  monuments, 
trained  and  disciplined  in  all  that  pertains  to 
intellectual  and  spiritual  experience,  may  be 
prepared  for  entering  at  a  later  time  into  that 
course  of  specialization  which  is  imperative 
and  inevitable. 

Professor  William  James  has  of  late  shown 
very  clearly  the  questionable  results,  in  the  do- 

86 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

main  of  pure  science,  of  a  system  of  education 
too  highly  specialized  and  too  contemptuous  of 
other  fields  of  mental  and  spiritual  activity; 
and  already  a  movement  has  begun  amongst 
architects  and  engineers  —  two  of  the  most 
highly  specialized  of  professions  —  in  favour 
of  a  scheme  of  training  which  shall  extend  over 
a  far  longer  term  of  years  and  be  devoted,  for 
the  major  part  of  this  period,  to  the  assimila- 
tion of  those  elements  of  pure  culture  which  ap- 
parently, and  in  the  nineteenth-century  view, 
have  no  direct  bearing  on  the  case,  but  tend 
only  toward  the  goal  of  general  cultivation. 

The  old  system  of  electives,  specialization, 
and  short-term  training  has  brought  us  to  a  de- 
batable pass;  our  civilization  is  menaced  by 
strange  and  ominous  tendencies  and  impulses; 
if  we  are  to  stem  the  tide  of  crescent  barbarism, 
which  in  spite  of  our  vast  and  penetrating  edu- 
cational organism  has  risen  up  against  us,  we 
must  follow,  not  the  nineteenth  but  the  twen- 
tieth century  in  its  educational  tendencies. 
And  so  following,  we  shall  find  that  it  is  not  a 
question  of  conservation  that  confronts  us,  but 
of  extension,  of  the  acceptance  of  new  or  long- 

87 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

forgotten  agencies  toward  the  development  of 
pure  culture,  and  of  these  none  quite  stands  on 
the  level  of  the  history  and  theory  and  phil- 
osophy of  the  fine  arts.  Abandoning  forever 
the  idea  of  the  arts  as  a  product,  and  accepting 
them  as  a  manifestation,  we  shall  soon  realize 
that  without  a  full  familiarity  with  their  history 
and  of  the  philosophy  of  their  being,  liberal 
education  is  an  impossibility.  These  things  can 
no  more  be  omitted  from  the  education  of  the 
prospective  merchant  and  financier  and  scien- 
tist than  from  that  of  the  professional  educa- 
tor; for  they  are  the  basis  of  culture,  and  with- 
out culture  we  are  barbarians,  however  much 
the  balance  of  trade  may  be  in  our  favour  at 
the  end  of  any  given  fiscal  year. 

And  of  all  these  great  educational  agencies 
I  place  at  the  head,  art,  in  its  history,  its  philos- 
ophy, its  practice ;  for  it  is  the  summing-up  of 
all  that  goes  before :  the  true  history  of  the  true 
man ;  and  its  records  are  infinitely  more  reliable 
and  significant  than  are  those  chronicles  that 
concern  themselves  with  the  unimportant  de- 
tails of  the  rise  and  fall  of  dynasties,  the  fabri- 
cation and  annulment  of  laws,  the  doings  and 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

death  of  kings.  The  Middle  Ages  are  inex- 
plicable unless  you  read  their  revelation  in 
Chartres  and  Amiens  and  Paris  and  Westmin- 
ster and  Wells,  and  in  the  shattered  vestiges  of 
monastic  glory  that  cast  their  wistful  glamour 
over  the  English  counties  while  they  blot  a 
nation's  history  with  the  enduring  annals  of 
a  stupendous  crime.  The  Renaissance  is  an 
impossible  interlude  of  horror,  dissociated 
from  the  splendid  vesture  the  painters  and 
sculptors  and  poets  wrought  out  of  the  inheri- 
tance of  medievalism  to  clothe  its  pagan  naked- 
ness. And  why?  Simply  because  through  art 
alone  has  been  expressed  those  qualities  which 
reach  above  the  earth-circle,  those  things 
which  are  the  essential  elements  of  the  race  and 
time. 

For  art  is  the  voicing  of  the  oversoul,  the 
manifestation  of  the  superman,  and  through  art 
alone  can  we  read  of  essential  things.  Monasti- 
cism,  the  crusades,  feudalism,  chivalry  are  to  us 
matters  aloof  and  incredible,  but  they  brought 
into  being  an  art  that  rises  even  higher  than  the 
art  of  Greece ;  and  through  study  of  this  art  we 
are  able  to  see  into  the  soul  of  the  time-spirit 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

that  created  it,  and,  so  seeing,  we  are  no  longer 
able  to  call  the  great  institutions  of  mediaeval- 
ism  barbarous  and  darkened,  for  their  real  na- 
ture is  revealed,  and  we  know  them  for  what 
they  were,  foundation  stones  of  civilization. 

For  many  generations  we  have  been  taught 
to  look  on  the  Dark  Ages,  mediaevalism,  the 
Renaissance,  the  Reformation,  the  Revolution, 
from  certain  definite  standpoints.  We  have  been 
led  to  believe  that  with  the  climax  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  the  great  epoch  associated  with  the  names 
of  Greece  and  Rome,  which  had  slowly  crumbled 
after  Rome  herself  had  received  her  deathblow 
at  the  hands  of  Northern  barbarians,  had,  in  its 
long-continued  degeneration,  reached  at  last  its 
pit  of  final  fall,  whence  it  has  been  steadily 
emerging  by  virtue  of  the  impulse  imparted  by 
the  Renaissance,  established  by  the  Reforma- 
tion, and  guaranteed  by  the  Revolution,  until 
at  last  it  has  mounted  to  the  dizzy  height  where 
now  it  stands  poised  for  further  flight.  Now  this 
theory,  so  simple,  so  cheerful  and  gratifying,  is 
challenged ;  men  are  not  wanting  to  declare  the 
Middle  Ages  to  be  one  of  the  starlike  points  of 
man's  achievement,  the  Renaissance  but  the 

90 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

first  aspect  of  a  great  catastrophe  that  was  to 
overwhelm  Christian  civilization  in  ruin.  Now, 
even  if  this  theory  is  extreme  and  but  the 
natural  revulsion  of  feeling  sequent  on  the  sud- 
den discovery  of  a  false  path  followed  too  long, 
it  is  still  true  that  the  present  estimate  of  the 
Renaissance  is  quite  as  different  from  the  old  as 
is  the  new  view  of  medievalism.  For  this  radi- 
cal and  most  salutary  change  we  are  indebted 
in  a  great  degree  to  the  rediscovery  of  the 
fine  arts  that  occurred  in  the  last  century,  and 
to  the  resulting  conviction  that  through  them 
we  might  scrutinize  the  history  of  the  times 
that  employed  them,  to  our  own  advantage 
and  to  the  extreme  benefit  of  our  historical  per- 
spective. Already  through  our  study  of  mediae- 
val art  we  have  come  to  learn  something  of 
what  medievalism  really  was,  and  now  we  are 
applying  the  same  test  to  the  Renaissance; 
though  with  a  difference,  for  here  we  have  for- 
given Alexander  VI  and  Leo  X,  Torquemada 
and  Machiavelli,  for  the  sake  of  Leonardo, 
Botticelli,  Donatello,  and  Mino  da  Fiesole, 
whereas,  when  we  come  to  study  the  philos- 
ophy of  the  art  of  the  Renaissance,  we  find  that 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

the  major  part  of  it  was,  not  the  fruit  of  the 
"  Revival  of  Learning/*  but  in  simple  fact  the 
very  flowering  of  medievalism ;  acquiring  little 
from  the  Renaissance  beyond  certain  accidents 
of  form,  the  soul  remaining  mediaeval  still. 
Shorn  of  the  great  names  of  the  cinquecento, 
and  with  little  left  of  artistic  glory  save  the 
transitionals  (Michelangelo,  Raphael,  Cellini), 
the  Renaissance  seems  gaunt  enough,  for  its 
true  artistic  expression  appears  in  such  doleful 
form  as  Guido,  the  Caracci,  Salvator  Rosa,  and 
the  so-called  "architects"  of  Roman  grandi- 
osity. Here  are  two  examples  of  the  radical 
change  in  our  view  of  comparative  civilization 
that  has  been  effected  through  the  study  and 
appreciation  of  art;  and  if  a  third  is  needed, 
witness  Japan,  where,  through  art  apprecia- 
tion, our  eyes  became  opened  to  the  existence  of 
a  great  and  wonderful  civilization  unparallelled, 
almost,  in  its  intensity  and  its  enduring  nature. 
But  it  is  not  only  as  the  test  of  history,  the 
measure  of  comparative  civilization,  that  the 
study  and  appreciation  of  art  in  all  its  forms  is 
of  inestimable  value.  Above  all  this,  it  is  the 
touchstone  of  life,  the  prover  of  standards,  the 

92 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

director  of  choice.  Accepted,  assimilated,  it 
becomes  one  of  the  great  builders  of  character, 
linked  indissolubly  with  religion  and  philosophy 
toward  the  final  goal  of  right  feeling,  right  think- 
ing, and  right  conduct.  The  false  principles  of 
the  sixteeeth  century,  the  savage  hatred  of 
the  seventeenth,  the  chaos  and  violence  on  the 
one  hand  and  the  empty  formalism  on  the  other, 
of  the  eighteenth,  the  materialism  and  the  men- 
tal self-satisfaction  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
all  worked  together  to  crush  out  of  humanity 
this  greatest  gift  of  God ;  but  the  revulsion  has 
come,  the  fruit  of  the  tree  of  knowledge  has 
been  eaten  and  it  is  very  bitter,  and  once  more 
men  rise  up  to  proclaim  the  existence  and  the 
glory  of  the  unsolvable  mysteries,  and  to  de- 
mand again  their  heritage  in  beauty  and  art. 

For  from  the  beginning  of  things  beauty  has 
been  the  last  resort  of  man  when  he  has  risen 
above  his  earthly  limitations  and  has  laid  hold 
on  immortality.  In  Eastern  philosophy  we  read 
of  karma,  that  essential  thing  that  persists 
through  death  and  beyond  dissolution,  linking 
life  to  life  in  an  endless  sequence  of  change  and 
evolution;  and  whether,  with  the  East,  we  be- 

93 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

lieve  this  golden  chain  to  be  woven  of  myriads 
of  sequent  lives  that  are  yet  one,  or  whether,  with 
the  West,  we  hold  it  to  be  but  the  persisting 
inheritance  from  equal  myriads  of  ancestors, 
the  thing  itself  we  accept,  and  art,  itself  a  sacra- 
ment, shows  through  the  outward  and  visible 
sign,  which  is  beauty,  the  inward  and  spiritual 
grace  that  is  built  up  of  sequent  lives  and  com- 
bined experiences. 

Beauty  is  a  mystery,  for  it  is  a  great  symbol. 
Why,  we  do  not  know,  but  the  fact  is  there. 
Out  of  the  accumulated  approximations  to 
infinity  that  have  marked  ten  thousand  thou- 
sand forgotten  lives,  we  have  reared  a  Great 
Approximation,  which  may  be  called  the  Inti- 
mation of  the  Absolute,  and  beauty  is  the  mode 
of  its  manifestation,  art  the  concrete  expres- 
sion thereof.  Regarded  in  this  light  and  not  as  a 
group  of  specialized  activities,  we  see  at  once  how 
absolutely  it  becomes  a  part  of  a  liberal  educa- 
tion, perhaps  even  the  highest  part.  In  them- 
selves the  facts  of  date  and  method  and  au- 
thorship are  secondary  and  unimportant  when 
we  study  the  cathedrals  of  France,  the  abbeys 
of  England,  the  sculpture  of  Greece  and  that 

94 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

of  thirteenth-century  Europe  and  of  Fuji- 
wara  Japan,  the  Gregorian  music  of  Italy  and 
the  nineteenth-century  music  of  Germany,  the 
painting  of  the  Italian  cinquecento,  and  of  the 
Hangchou  epoch  in  China  and  the  Ashikaga 
period  in  Japan.  These  are  but  the  documents 
in  the  case,  the  data  furnished  us  by  genera- 
tions unnumbered;  and  through  them,  by 
the  processes  of  pure  philosophy,  we  may  lay 
hold  of  that  which  we  cannot  acquire  through 
any  other  means  whatever  —  the  spiritual  ex- 
periences and  the  spiritual  achievements  of 
dead  civilizations. 

And  this  is  history,  its  acquisition  and  assimi- 
lation, culture.  Dynastic  facts,  material  pro- 
ducts, the  historical  kaleidoscope  of  changing 
laws  and  customs,  ecclesiastical  councils,  fluc- 
tuant heresies  and  defiant  counter-reformations, 
—  what  are  these  but  the  dry  bones  religion 
and  art  make  beautiful  and  alive?  The  art  of 
a  time  is  the  touchstone  of  its  efficiency  and  by 
that  art  shall  it  be  judged.  And  more:  through 
study  of  the  philosophy  of  beauty  and  through 
a  recognition  of  what  art  signifies  of  any  race 
or  time,  we  shall  come  to  that  revision  of  stand- 

95 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

ards  which  is  the  inevitable  precursor  of  a  new 
epoch  of  civilization.  Neither  socialism  nor 
public-school  education,  secularism  nor  ethical 
culture,  free  silver  nor  the  strenuous  life,  can 
serve  as  antidote  to  the  ills  that  confront  us; 
but  only  that  fundamental  revision  of  standards 
that  will  show  us  the  true  inwardness  of  the 
trust  and  the  labour  union,  the  professional 
politician  and  the  grafter,  the  money  test  of 
social  distinctions,  and  contemporary  news- 
paper journalism.  By  acceptance  of  the  artis- 
tic tests,  and  by  proficiency  in  that  philosophy 
of  art  which  makes  the  application  of  these  tests 
possible,  we  are  put  in  possession  of  a  kind  of 
universal  solvent,  a  final  common  denominator, 
and  before  our  eyes  the  baffling  chaos  of  chron- 
icles, records,  and  historic  facts  opens  out  into 
order  and  simplicity;  for  the  facts  in  the  case 
prove  only  what  was  done,  the  art  testimony 
reveals  what  was  thought  and  felt  and  imagined 
—  in  other  words,  why  the  things  were  done. 

And  so  we  return  to  our  original  proposition : 
the  statement  that  the  Renaissance  brought 
into  being  a  theory  of  art  categorically  false 
and  inevitably  destructive  of  that  which  it 

96 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

strove  to  patronize.  To  do  this,  to  foist  this 
profound  and  far-reaching  heresy  on  the  world, 
it  had  first  to  destroy  the  sound  and  lucid  view 
of  art  that  had  been  inherited  from  paganism 
by  Christianity  and  maintained  intact  until  the 
fifteenth  century.  The  time  has  come  at  last 
for  a  return  to  the  ancient  ideals,  for  the  falsity 
of  the  substitute  has  proved  itself;  and  to  effect 
this  end  the  first  thing  we  have  to  do  is  to  admit 
that  beauty  is  one  of  the  sacraments  in  a  uni- 
verse wholly  and  absolutely  sacramental  in  its 
nature;  the  second  is  to  realize  that  this  same 
sacrament  of  beauty  is  the  symbolical  expres- 
sion of  the  experiences  and  the  achievements  of 
the  human  soul ;  and  the  third  is  to  reject  the 
Renaissance  idea  that  art  is  an  affair  of  caste 
as  already  we  have  rejected  the  Protestant  idea 
that  it  is  a  snare  of  the  devil,  recognizing  it,  as 
in  truth  it  is,  the  evidence  of  true  civilization 
and  its  only  unerring  record. 

Then  follows  the  new  building-up ;  the  study 
and  formulating  of  the  philosophy  of  art  as  a 
result,  a  manifestation,  and  a  language.  And 
in  the  process  greater  things  will  follow  than  a 
revision  of  our  historical  estimates,  than  a  new 

97 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

vision  of  the  essential  things  in  human  life. 
We  shall,  I  believe,  change  our  attitude  toward 
the  great  thousand  years  of  Christian  domina- 
tion, toward  the  Renaissance  and  the  several 
modifications  thereof  which  we  know  beneath 
a  different  nomenclature.  It  is  conceivable, 
also,  that  our  estimate  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury itself  may  be  modified  in  certain  particu- 
lars ;  but,  however  desirable  these  changes  may 
be,  and  to  me  it  seems  that  their  importance 
can  hardly  be  estimated  in  words,  there  is  yet 
another  thing  that  will  follow,  of  importance 
paramount  and  inestimable,  and  that  is  the 
great  revision  of  standards,  the  reestablishing 
of  that  proper  sense  of  proportion  that  alone 
can  guarantee  the  continuation  and  the  onward 
development  of  civilization  itself. 

It  has  been  sometimes  said,  though  without 
a  deep  sense  of  conviction,  and  certainly  with- 
out enthusiastic  response  on  the  part  of  the 
general  public,  that  whatever  we  have  gained 
through  our  great  eras  of  the  dominion  of  in- 
dustrialism and  of  natural  science  has  been  at 
the  expense  of  a  sense  of  proportion.  To  me 
this  seems  axiomatic,  despite  its  unpopularity. 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

Scrutinize  closely  the  standards  that  reveal 
themselves  through  contemporary  journalism, 
Pennsylvania  politics,  San  Francisco  graft,  the 
Cceur  d'Alene  affair,  the  life  insurance  and  rail- 
road and  trust  investigations,  the  present  pro- 
tective tariff,  the  congressional  attitude  toward 
pensions,  river  and  harbour  improvements,  and 
colonial  import  duties,  the  divorce  epidemic, 
Dowieism,  Eddyism,  Sanfordism ;  and,  contrast- 
ing these,  as  they  reveal  themselves,  with  the 
standards  of  the  monasticism  of  the  Dark  Ages, 
the  crusades  and  the  chivalry  of  medievalism, 
answer  whether  or  no  "lack  of  sense  of  propor- 
tion "  is  not  the  gentlest  term  that  may  be  ap- 
plied to  the  contemporary  spirit  of  the  world. 
I  began  by  saying  that  to  me  the  inalienable 
rights  of  man  were  religion,  art,  and  joyful 
labour.  We  have  rejected  the  first,  destroyed 
the  latter,  and  I  am  willing  to  defend  the  thesis 
that  our  action  in  these  directions  is  primarily 
responsible  for  the  disappearance  of  the  third 
from  life  as  we  know  it.  How  are  we  to  regain 
our  birthright;  how  reestablish  once  more  the 
consciousness  of  the  impassable  barrier  between 
the  knowable  and  the  unknowable;  restore 

99 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

again  acceptance  of  the  eternal  truth  that  the 
seen  is  but  the  pale  type  of  the  unseen ;  over- 
throw the  great  heresy,  "There  is  no  mystery"  ? 
how  rebuild  that  essential  sense  of  proportion 
and  of  relative  values,  how  effect  that  revision 
of  standards  that  must  precede  a  new  epoch  of 
civilization?  History  gives  record  of  but  two 
methods  that  have  been  effective  in  the  past; 
the  vast  religious  revolution  and  the  purging 
fire  of  national  disaster  and  barbarian  invasion. 
As  for  the  first,  no  St.  Benedict,  St.  Bernard, 
or  St.  Francis  is  for  the  moment  visible,  but 
only  false  prophets  of  a  false  dawn ;  and  as  for 
the  latter,  God  forbid  that  we  should  await 
this  last  resort  of  divine  justice.  There  is, 
theoretically  speaking,  a  third  way,  but  one 
which  has,  I  believe,  never  yet  been  essayed 
with  success;  still,  the  chance  is  there,  and,  if 
we  are  wise,  we  shall  take  the  chance.  From 
the  standpoint  of  pure  reason  it  would  seem 
possible  for  us  to  learn  a  lesson  from  the  past 
and  so  avert  that  vain  repetition  of  history  to 
which  we  claim  to  be  averse.  And  what  the  real 
past  was,  not  what  it  seems  through  its  mere  ma- 
terialization, art  most  potently  helps  us  to  know. 

100 


THE  FINE  ARTS  IN  EDUCATION 

To  art  men  turned  when  the  joy  of  living  and 
the  wonder  of  spiritual  experience  and  the  pas- 
sion of  religious  ardour  became  intolerable  in 
their  poignancy  and  clamorous  for  perfect  ex- 
pression; to  art  we  must  return,  that,  by  its 
talismanic  potency,  it  may  unlock  the  barred 
gates  of  human  experience.  This  also  is  the 
primary  object  of  liberal  education,  and  when 
we  have  achieved  this  knowledge,  we  shall  find 
that  the  veil  is  lifted,  that  our  sense  of  propor- 
tion has  returned,  that  our  standards  are  again 
at  one  with  the  standards  of  all  history  and  need 
no  further  revision.  Once  more  we  shall  find 
religion  and  art  and  joyful  labour  the  restored 
essentials  of  life,  and  then  the  higher  mission  of 
our  schools  of  art  will  have  been  accomplished, 
and  our  burgeoning  civilization  will  blossom 
gloriously  in  the  painters  and  the  sculptors  and 
architects,  the  musicians  and  poets  and  crafts- 
men, who,  no  longer  voices  crying  in  the  wilder- 
ness, will  become  the  inspired  mouthpieces  of 
an  emancipated  race,  proclaiming  the  wonder 
and  the  glory  of  a  noble  and  a  beautiful  and  a 
joyful  life. 


IV 

THE    ARTIST    AND    THE    WORLD 


IV 

THE    ARTIST    AND    THE    WORLD  l 

ITVDR  two  generations  we  have  watched  the 
-*-  crescent  enthusiasm  for  art,  and  the  fever- 
ish widening  of  art  interest  and  art  activity 
that  are  the  continuance  in  a  new  community 

Nrf  a  movement  engendered  in  the  Old  World, 
now  nearly  a  century  ago.  The  significance  of 
the  movement  is  profound,  its  possibilities  for 
good  almost  unlimited,  but  its  dangers  are  no 
less,  and  it  is  of  these  dangers  I  desire  to  speak 
at  this  time. 

t  propose  to  say  something  as  to  the  relation 
of  the  artist  to  society,  to  the  world  of  men 
and  women  that  is  at  the  same  time  his  environ- 

-  ment,  his  inspiration,  and  his  opportunity.  Of 
the  artist,  whatever  one  of  the  seven  great  arts 
he  follows,  —  for  artistic  differentiation  is  acci- 
dental, —  the  artistic  impulse  is  one. 

We  hear  very  much  of  the  relation  of  the  artist 
to  his  own  particular  art,  to  art  itself,  to  history 

i  Read  at  Commencement,  Yale  University  School  of 
Fine  Arts. 

105 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

and  tradition :  I  myself  have  had  the  honour  of 
speaking  in  this  place  on  the  position  art  should 
hold  in  its  relation  to  education ;  in  season  and 
out  of  season  I  have  urged  the  intimate  bond 
that  unites  art  and  religion  in  a  common  service. 
With  your  permission  we  will  broaden  the  scope 
of  our  persistent  inquiry,  and  ask  as  to  the  func- 
tion of  the  artist  as  an  integral  member  of  that 
human  society  which  is  so  much  greater  and 
more  momentous  than  he  or  any  other  indi- 
vidual ;  that  common  life  of  humanity  of  which 
the  artist  is  the  product  and  that  he  is  bound 
to  serve  with  all  the  great  and  singular  powers 
that  mark  his  personality. 

It  is  not  inappropriate  that  such  an  inquiry 
should  be  made  in  this  place  and  at  this  time. 
The  Yale  School  of  Fine  Arts  is  not  a  centre  of 
empirical  theorizing,  an  archaeological  gymna- 
sium, a  laboratory  of  scientific  research ;  it  is  a 
school  of  artists ;  it  aims  to  reveal  something  of 
the  eternal  significance  of  art,  to  arouse  those 
aesthetic  faculties  that  have  lain  dormant  in  our 
race  so  many  generations,  in  order  that  they 
may  become  creative  agencies,  manifesting 
themselves  in  time  and  space  for  the  service  of 

106 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

man,  and  therefore  for  the  glory  of  God.  Such 
a  school  I  conceive  to  be  the  only  type  that  is 
justifiable,  —  since  schools  we  must  have  for 
the  regaining  of  our  lost  heritage,  —  but  it  is 
precisely  here  that  perils  intrude  themselves 
most  insidiously,  wherefore  they  must  always 
be  held  clearly  in  mind;  for  not  even  religion 
itself  is  more  endangered  by  the  "false  doctrine, 
heresy,  and  schism"  from  which  we  rightly  pray 
to  be  delivered. 

Do  not  misunderstand  me,  I  beg  of  you.  I 
do  not  dream  of  postulating  of  art  schools  in 
general,  still  less  of  this  Yale  school  in  particu- 
lar, a  primacy  in  error  or  a  peculiarity  of  sole 
possession.  The  dangers  lie,  not  in  the  schools 
as  such,  but  in  society  itself;  in  the  very  bone 
and  sinew  of  man  as  he  is  to-day.  They  are  part 
and  parcel  of  our  own  contemporary  civiliza- 
tion, and  they  show  themselves  in  Church  and 
in  state,  in  business  and  professional  and  social 
life,  more  generally,  perhaps,  than  in  the  life 
of  art ;  but  it  is  in  the  latter  category  that  they 
may  be  most  fatal  in  their  operation.  It  matters 
comparatively  little  if  for  the  moment  the 
Church  or  some  sect  abandons  itself  to  evil 

107 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

artistic  tendencies ;  if  a  combination  of  illiter- 
ate legislators  and  a  temporarily  omnipotent 
politician  are  victorious  in  their  schemes  for 
defeating  the  ends  of  culture  and  civilization ; 
if  the  preponderating  weight  of  public  opinion 
degrades  the  drama,  prostitutes  music  and 
poetry  to  the  most  ignoble  ends,  and  makes  of 
the  great  art  of  religious  ceremonial  a  barren 
desert  or  a  riot  of  degenerate  taste.  All  these 
pass;  they  are  the  froth  of  a  churning  mael- 
strom of  new  activity ;  but  if  the  artist  is  him- 
self false  to  the  ideal  of  his  art,  if  he  yields  to  the 
insidious  influences  that  surround  him,  then 
not  only  is  he  faithless  to  the  trust  imposed 
in  him  through  the  gift  of  artistic  expression, 
but  he  engenders  a  poison  that  courses  subtly 
and  far  through  the  veins  of  the  society  he  came 
into  the  world  to  serve. 

During  the  last  century  it  is  hard  to  suppose 
that  a  true  philosophical  conception  of  art 
should  have  achieved  popular  acceptance,  and 
as  a  matter  of  fact  it  did  not,  the  proudest 
products  being  similar  in  their  nature  to  that 
definition  of  beauty  evolved  by  Grant  Allen: 
"The  aesthetically  beautiful  is  that  which  af- 

108 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

fords  the  maximum  of  stimulation  with  the 
minimum  of  fatigue  or  waste,  in  processes  not 
directly  connected  with  vital  functions  " ;  surely 
the  most  grotesque  example  of  serene  incapac- 
ity anywhere  recorded  in  that  congeries  of 
incapacities,  the  literature  of  aesthetics.  It  is, 
however,  of  great  value  as  putting  in  concrete 
form  the  spiritual  inefficiency  of  the  dominant 
influence  in  the  nineteenth  century,  and  it  is 
just  because  a  new  tendency  now  is  visible  that 
we  may  take  heart  of  hope  and  believe  that  a 
saner  and  more  penetrating  view  is  possible. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  a  profound  revolution 
is  now  in  process,  a  revolution  that  is  inter- 
penetrating every  category  of  intellectual  and 
spiritual  activity,  and  by  the  glare  of  the  red 
conflagrations  that  are  crumbling  the  tall  towers 
of  our  intellectual  pride,  we  see  revealed  the 
cloud-capped  mountains  of  spiritual  endeavour, 
piercing  that  very  heaven  of  mystery  we  with 
infinite  labour  had  striven  to  scale  with  our 
Babel-towers  of  misguided  ingenuity. 

Very  slowly  it  is  dawning  on  us  that  for 
several  centuries  we  have  been  confusing  our 
categories  and,  by  methods  and  agencies  ade- 

109 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

quate  to  the  estimating  of  phenomena,  have 
been  trying  to  weigh  and  determine  the  Abso- 
lute Truth  that  lies  behind  and  above.  Failing 
miserably,  we  have  come  to  doubt,  not  the  effi- 
ciency of  our  methods,  but  the  very  existence 
of  anything  they  could  not  demonstrate.  This, 
I  think,  is  the  essence  of  the  great  revolution 
now  going  on  about  us,  and  even  more  within 
ourselves:  the  discovery  that  those  brilliant 
products  of  our  epoch,  natural  science  and  natu- 
ral philosophy,  have  their  limitations ;  that  be- 
yond the  uttermost  radius  of  their  possible  ac- 
tivity lies  the  vast  and  mysterious  domain 
of  the  real,  the  Absolute ;  as  vital  to  man  and  as 
unconquered  as  ever  it  was  in  the  past ;  as  un- 
conquered,  but  neither  forbidden  nor  beyond 
achievement,  since  by  the  grace  of  God  even 
that  Absolute,  that  final  mystery  of  ultimate 
truth,  reveals  itself  symbolically  to  those  who 
open  their  hearts  in  reverence  and  with  humble 
spirit,  even  though  it  is  denied  to  that  insolence 
of  assumed  wisdom  that  presumes  to  set  metes 
and  bounds  to  the  infinite  majesty  of  God. 

And  it  is  this  high  function  of  superhuman 
revelation  to  which  I  refer  when  I  speak  of  all 

no 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

art  as  the  natural,  and,  indeed,  the  only  ade- 
quate, expression  in  time  and  space  of  spiritual 
things.  This  it  has  been  in  all  the  great  past; 
this  it  must  be  in  the  great  future.  Adopting 
this  final  view  of  the  essential  function  of  art, 
we  shall  see,  I  think,  how  great  the  danger  that 
follows  from  the  acceptance  of  any  less  lofty 
view,  how  incalculable  the  loss  to  society,  and 
how  much  a  matter  of  moment  is  the  question 
of  the  relation  of  the  artist  to  the  world  of  men 
and  women  in  which  he  lives,  how  limitless  the 
field  that  opens  before  him,  how  far-flung  and 
wide-reaching  the  lines  of  his  service. 

Master  of  the  great  language,  articulate 
amongst  the  tongueless,  it  is  for  him  to  express 
all  the  spiritual  essays,  ventures,  and  dis- 
coveries ;  all  the  dreams,  aspirations,  and  visions 
of  the  mounting  wave  of  humanity  that  bears 
him  on  its  crest  toward  the  stars.  Seer,  spokes- 
man, and  prophet,  he  divines  in  scientific  tri- 
umphs the  inner  significance  that  gives  them 
value  and  that  the  scientist  himself  some- 
times sees  not  at  all ;  material,  industrial,  eco- 
nomical development  are  to  him  but  husks 
hiding  a  precious  kernel ;  democracy,  socialism, 

in 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

anarchy  but  the  ugly  outward  form  of  the 
enchanted  prince  in  the  fairy  tale.  Through 
crabbed  shards  he  penetrates  to  the  hidden 
jewel,  snatches  it  forth,  and  uplifts  it  in  the 
sight  of  wondering  men.  This  he  does  in  his 
function  as  seer :  as  mouthpiece  he  proclaims  the 
hidden  mysteries  of  the  soul,  the  quests  and  pil- 
grimages and  adventures  of  the  knights-errant 
of  the  spirit ;  not  his  own  alone,  —  less  his  than 
those  of  all  his  fellows,  to  whom,  by-  some 
mystical  affinity,  his  consciousness  is  delicately 
attuned,  answering  the  faint  and  distant  call, 
voicing  it  in  the  universal  language  he  alone 
commands,  though  every  God-given  soul  wholly 
and  instantly  comprehends.  And  as  prophet 
he  distances  the  runners  in  the  race  of  life, 
mounting  the  crags  and  cliffs  of  the  cloud- 
capped  hills  until  he  sees  the  far  horizons  of 
the  promised,  the  inevitable,  but  as  yet  the 
unachieved. 

Sophocles  and  Phidias,  Virgil,  Anthemius  of 
Tralles,  the  unknown  builders  of  mediaeval  ab- 
beys and  cathedrals,  the  forgotten  creators  of 
the  Nibelungenlied  and  the  Arthurian  legends ; 
St.  Gregory  and  his  masters  of  music ;  St.  Bene- 

112 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

diet  Biscop  and  St.  Dunstan  with  their  crafts- 
men: Cimabue  and  Giotto  and  Leonardo; 
Dante  and  Shakespeare;  Bach,  Beethoven, 
Wagner,  Browning  —  what  are  they  and  their 
fellows  and  peers  but  divinely  constituted  seers, 
clamant  trumpets,  prophets  whose  lips  have 
been  touched  with  the  live  coal  of  the  altar  of 
God ;  speaking  now  in  the  Pentecostal  tongues 
of  art,  the  which  every  man  hears  as  his  own 
language ;  hears  and  understands  ? 

To  every  artist  it  is  given  so  to  voice  some- 
thing of  that  which  is  best  and  highest  in  man. 
To  the  sculptor  no  less  than  the  poet,  to  the 
architect  no  less  than  the  painter,  to  the  drama- 
tist and  the  maker  of  liturgies  and  ceremonial 
no  less  than  the  master  of  music.  Each  art  has 
its  own  peculiar  methods,  the  ordained  instru- 
ments of  its  operation ;  but  each  is  but  a  dialect 
of  a  normal  language  that  reveals,  in  symbolical 
form  and  through  the  unsolvable  mystery  of 
beauty,  all  that  men  may  achieve  of  the  mysti- 
cal knowledge  of  that  Absolute  Truth  and  Ab- 
solute Beauty  that  transcend  material  experi- 
ence and  intellectual  expression,  since  they  are 
of  the  essential  being  of  God. 

113 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

The  artist  is  bound  and  controlled  by  the 
laws  of  his  art,  but  doubly  is  he  bound  by  his 
duty  to  society.  If  he  is  prohibited  —  as  he  is 
under  penalty  of  aesthetic  damnation  —  from 
denying  beauty  or  contenting  himself  with  ex- 
pedients, or  sacrificing  any  jot  or  tittle  of  the 
integrity  of  his  art  to  fashion,  or  vulgarity,  or 
the  lust  of  evil  things,  still  more  is  he  bound  to 
mankind  by  the  law  of  noblesse  oblige,  and  by 
the  fear  of  God,  to  use  his  art  only  for  the  high- 
est ends,  to  proclaim  only  the  vision  of  perfec- 
tion, to  cleave  only  to  the  revelation  of  heav- 
enly things.  The  architect  who  abandons 
himself  to  the  creation  of  ugliness,  however 
academic  may  be  its  cachet ;  the  painter  who 
"paints  what  he  sees"  or  makes  his  art  the 
ministry  of  lust;  the  sculptor  who  regards  the 
form  and  sees  nothing  of  the  substance ;  the  poet 
who  glorifies  the  hideous  shape  of  atheism,  or 
the  grossness  of  the  accidents  of  life ;  the  musi- 
cian who  exalts  the  morbid  and  the  horrible; 
the  maker  of  ceremonials  who  assembles  de- 
praved arts  in  a  vain  simulacrum  of  ancient  and 
noble  liturgies,  —  these  are  but  traitors  to  man 
and  God,  and  however  competent  their  craft, 

114 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

they  are  enemies  of  the  people,  and  to  them 
should  be  meted  the  condemnation  of  their 
kind. 

For  many  generations  there  has  been  too 
much  of  this,  and  the  plea  offered  in  extenua- 
tion, "The  public  demands  it,"  is  not  a  justifi- 
cation, but  an  intensification  of  criminality. 
It  is  vicious  enough  in  journalism  and  politics, 
since  it  is  the  death-warrant  of  society,  but  it 
is  ten  times  more  evil  in  art,  for  the  life-blood 
of  art  is  the  giving  of  something  a  little  better 
than  men  consciously  desire;  the  expression  of 
the  subconscious,  which  so  often  is  the  real  man 
working  deeply  in  the  mysterious  fastnesses  of 
the  soul.  If  the  artist  sells  himself  for  bread,  if 
he  is  driven  by  the  harsh  compulsion  of  poverty 
to  sacrifice  his  art  to  Hydra,  there  should  be 
pity  for  him  on  earth  as  there  surely  is  mercy 
for  him  in  heaven,  but  I  know  of  no  other  justi- 
fication for  his  sin.  Even  in  the  golden  days 
when  men  could  rename  a  road,  calling  it  the 
Street  of  Rejoicing,  because  in  a  singing  pro- 
cession all  the  people  of  the  quarter  had  carried 
through  it  to  its  altar  in  the  parish  church  a 
new  picture  by  a  new  painter,  the  art  they  ac- 

"5 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

claimed  was  good  to  them,  not  because  it  was 
the  old  and  familiar  art  they  knew,  given  them 
by  the  mechanical  purveyors  of  Byzantine  tra- 
dition, but  because  it  was  a  newer  and  better 
thing,  the  picture  in  their  hearts,  not  the  pic- 
ture in  their  minds.  How  much  more,  then,  now 
that  the  popular  instinct  for  beauty  has  become 
a  craving  for  the  hideous  and  the  uncouth,  how 
much  more  is  it  necessary  that  every  artist, 
whatever  the  mode  of  his  work,  should  lay 
down  his  life,  if  need  be,  in  a  last  defence  of  the 
"something  better,"  knowing  his  day,  his 
year,  his  life  to  have  been  misspent  if  at  the 
end  of  either  one  he  could  not  say,  "I  have 
given  better  than  was  asked  or  expected  of 
me." 

Yet  even  in  this,  in  the  impulse  that  drives 
ever  onward,  that  marks  the  artist  as  does  his 
sense  of  beauty  and  his  creative  power,  there 
is  danger  of  the  sharpest  kind ;  the  peril  that 
lurks  on  the  serpent  tongue  of  the  time-spirit, 
luring  men  into  vain  imaginings  of  "new  art." 
It  is  a  subtle  and  specious  temptation ;  it  comes 
with  all  the  support  of  popular  enthusiasms 
for  breadth  and  liberality,  personal  emanci- 

116 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

pation  and  intellectual  independence,  human- 
ism, and  a  certain  temporal  and  racial  self-con- 
sciousness. It  is  of  the  same  ilk  as  that  eco- 
nomic nervousness  that  devises  pseudo-scientific 
panaceas  for  social  and  industrial  ills;  as  that 
religious  hysteria  that  fills  the  Saturday  edi- 
tions of  the  evening  papers  with  astonishing 
advertisements  of  unearthly  cults  and  wild 
philosophies :  it  asserts  the  need  of  new  modes 
of  expression  for  new  manifestations  of  life,  cast- 
ing doubt  and  disfavour  on  old  philosophies, 
old  religions,  old  arts.  Plato  and  Aristotle 
and  St.  Thomas  Aquinas  were  well  enough  for 
their  own  time,  and  doubtless  quite  wonderful. 
The  Catholic  Faith,  yes,  Christianity  itself, 
whatever  its  form,  served  excellently  in  an  unde- 
veloped stage  of  society  and  mental  accomplish- 
ment. Gothic  architecture  was  a  good  expres- 
sion of  its  peculiar  time.  But  we,  now  that  the 
shackles  of  superstition  have  been  shattered, 
now  that  the  intellect  is  really  emancipated  and 
we  have  produced  a  civilization  in  comparison 
with  which  Hellas  and  the  Roman  Republic 
and  the  Christian  Middle  Ages  were  but  as 
tentative  beginnings,  full  of  false  steps  and 

117 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

vagarious  wanderings,  we  must  create  our  own 
philosophy,  our  own  religion,  our  own  art. 

And  we  try:  whether  Monism  and  Pragma- 
tism, New  Thought,  Christian  Science,  and 
the  "Church  of  the  Higher  Life,"  Matisse, 
Richard  Strauss,  and  D'Annunzio  achieve  a 
degree  of  vital  and  enduring  expression  of  essen- 
tial things  that  gives  them  place  above  the 
philosophy,  the  religion,  and  the  art  of  the 
past,  is,  I  submit,  a  question  susceptible  of  dis- 
cussion. For  my  own  part  I  am  persuaded  that 
they  do  nothing  of  the  kind,  but  rather  that 
what  they  produce  is  in  no  respect  either  new 
philosophy,  new  religion,  or  new  art,  but  simply 
the  troubled  ferment  of  an  epoch  that,  having 
lost  its  sense  of  proportion,  fails  to  grasp  either 
its  own  deficiencies  or  the  notable  advantages 
that  are  attributable  to  the  times  and  the  men 
and  the  works  it  now  regards  with  a  patronizing 
toleration. 

And  in  holding  this  I  do  not  lose  sight  of  cer- 
tain elements  of  value  that  exist  in  each  one 
of  the  revolutionary  and  sometimes  anarchical 
protests  against  a  frozen  tradition,  the  value 
of  precisely  this  protest.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 

118 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

we  are  bound  hand  and  foot  to  a  traditionalism 
that  is  Byzantine  in  its  rigidity  and  mounts 
often  to  the  level  of  an  historic  superstition. 
The  nineteenth  century,  instead  of  being  an 
era  of  emancipation,  was  the  very  age  wherein 
were  forged  the  most  efficient  shackles  on  true 
freedom  of  thought  and  action.  Then  were  fixed 
in  final  form  all  the  narrowing  tendencies  of 
modern  life:  the  stolid  formulae  that  are  mak- 
ing of  parliamentary  government  a  synonym 
for  corruption  and  inefficiency ;  the  pretensions 
of  physical  science  that  have  turned  religion  out 
of  house  and  home;  the  carnival  of  industrial 
activity  that  has  threatened  to  revolutionize 
education  into  a  wilderness  of  "institutes  of 
commerce*'  and  "vocational  schools";  that  has 
brought  in  a  new  and  awful  form  of  serfage  and 
slavery  and  has  almost  overturned  the  ethical 
standards  of  society;  the  fanatical  exaggeration 
of  the  value  inherent  in  "free  speech  and  a  free 
press"  that  has  built  up  an  irresponsible  and 
unprincipled  engine  that  is  fast  becoming  a 
menace  to  civilization ;  the  literary  standard  of 
the  "best  seller,"  the  dramatic  standard  of  the 
"successful  run,"  the  academic  and  mechanical 

119 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

theories  of  art  that  metamorphose  the  gift  of 
God  into  a  series  of  hidebound  formulae  that 
are  taught  as  one  teaches  sanitary  engineering 
or  stenography. 

In  so  far  as  the  suffragettes  and  Mrs.  Eddy 
and  Matisse  and  Debussy  and  the  prophets  of 
"art  nouveau"  are  a  protest  and  a  rebellion 
against  the  mordant  superstitions  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  we  may  wish  them  well  in  their 
revolt,  but  when  they  assume  to  rebuild  as  well 
as  to  destroy,  then  we  must  arise  to  do  them 
battle.  The  Renaissance  broke  a  splendid  path 
through  a  fast-thickening  jungle,  but  once  in 
the  saddle,  Machiavelli  followed,  and  Alexan- 
der VI  ;  the  Reformation  was  a  mighty  destroyer 
of  evil,  but  its  substitutions  were  calamitous; 
the  Revolution  swept  Europe  clear  of  a  pesti- 
lence that  bred  death  and  hell,  but,  conquering, 
it  engendered  a  poison  that  still  runs  in  the  veins 
of  society.  The  power  that  destroys  can  never 
under  any  circumstances  rebuild ;  the  conquer- 
ors in  battle  may  never  organize  the  victory,  — 
a  lesson  the  world  seems  never  to  learn  even  in 
its  gray  hairs.  And  so,  for  the  artist,  the  very 
plausibility  of  the  new  revolutionists,  the  mani- 

120 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

fest  righteousness  of  their  crusade,  wins  a  con- 
fidence in  their  constructive  propaganda  that 
is  justified  only  in  their  campaign  of  destruc- 
tion. It  is  true  the  Old  Salon  is  simply  an  ever- 
renewed  museum  of  mechanical  toys  that  re- 
fuse to  go,  and  when  Matisse  in  decent  scorn 
and  disgust  paints  his  protest  in  a  kind  of  pic- 
torial anarchy,  when  Cezanne  thrusts  gratuitous 
ugliness  in  the  face  and  eyes  of  smug  imbecility, 
we  cheer  them  on,  and  are  bound  to  come  to 
their  aid ;  but  we  are  no  more  bound  thereafter 
to  their  following  than  we  should  have  been  to 
that  of  Marat  and  Robespierre  because  we  had 
taken  part  in  the  affair  of  the  Tennis  Court. 

It  would  be  folly  to  deny  that  our  own  era 
has  innumerable  elements  of  conspicuous  nov- 
elty, many  of  them  admirable  and  deeply  to 
be  desired,  others  no  less  loudly  acclaimed,  but 
essentially  worthy  only  of  condemnation.  That 
the  novel  things  are  so  radical  in  their  nature, 
so  Minerva-like  in  their  spontaneous  genera- 
tion, that  before  them  antiquity  stands  wonder- 
ing and  impotent,  I  venture  to  deny.  Neither 
the  hand,  nor  the  mind,  nor  the  soul  of  man  has 
created  or  revealed  during  the  last  four  centuries 

121 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

any  single  truth  or  aspect  of  truth  that  trans- 
cends the  powers  of  expression  of  the  philosophy, 
the  religion,  or  the  art  of  the  past.  New  modes 
of  expression,  —  yes,  quite  possibly;  indeed, 
surely ;  but  variety  of  expression  does  not  in- 
volve a  revolution  in  the  fundamental  law.  The 
philosophy  of  St.  Thomas  did  no  violence  to 
that  of  Aristotle;  the  religion  of  St.  Bernard,  or 
St.  Francis,  or  St.  Bona venture  was  one  with  the 
religion  of  the  Apostles ;  the  art  of  the  Middle 
Ages  was  based  on  the  fundamental  law  of  the 
art  of  Hellas ;  and  yet  how  infinitely  varied,  how 
bright  with  the  clear  light  of  new  dawns,  how 
infused  and  palpitant  with  new  blood,  new 
visions,  new  revelations.  The  eternal  laws  that 
control  the  operations  of  the  universe  were 
effective  before  the  nineteenth  century,  and 
they  were  perceived  and  acted  upon  before  the 
invention  of  printing  and  the  popularizing  of 
experimental  science  and  the  emancipation  of 
the  intellect.  New  foundations  there  are  none, 
new  superstructures  there  must  always  be,  end- 
less in  variety,  better  intrinsically,  perhaps,  than 
those  we  have  known  before,  but  if  they  are  to 
be  this,  if  they  are  to  rank  even  in  the  same 

122 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

category  with  the  wonders  of  the  past,  they 
must  be  wrought  in  obedience  to  the  same 
laws  that  have  held  from  the  beginning  of  time. 

Therefore,  the  artist  who,  fired  by  the  out- 
ward diversity  and  the  crescent  vitality  of  the 
life  that  environs  him  and  of  which  he  is  a  part, 
steps  beyond  the  bounds  of  possible  variation 
in  method  and  violates  the  eternal  law  of  his 
art,  ceases  at  that  instant  to  be  an  artist  and 
becomes  a  charlatan,  and  as  such  an  enemy  of 
the  people. 

All  the  art  of  every  time  is  founded  on  some 
specific  art  of  the  past ;  without  this  there  is  no 
foundation  save  that  of  shifting  sands.  If  it  re- 
mains in  bondage  to  this  older  art,  if,  like  the 
Munich  painting,  the  English  architecture,  the 
American  sculpture  of  half  a  century  ago,  it 
wanders  in  the  twilight  of  precedent  or,  in  fear 
and  trembling,  chains  itself  to  the  rock  of 
archaeology,  then  again  it  ceases  to  be  art  — 
ceases?  no;  it  has  never  even  begun:  it  is  only 
a  dreary  mocking  of  a  shattered  idol,  a  futile 
picture-puzzle  to  beguile  a  tedious  day. 

Between  these  perils  on  either  hand,  the 
temptation  toward  anarchical  novelty,  and  the 

123 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

temptation  toward  archaeological  sterility,  the 
artist  falls  often  to  the  ground ;  to  steer  a  safe 
course  between  Scylla  and  Charybdis,  is  hard, 
indeed,  the  more  so  in  that  the  old  landmarks, 
the  old  buoys  and  beacons  have  disappeared. 
If  we  only  possessed  at  least  the  conviction  that 
art  is  never  wholly  an  end  in  itself,  the  problem 
would  be  simpler,  but  this  knowledge  we  do 
not  have.  We  are  taught,  indeed,  the  nobility 
of  art,  the  varied  and  wonderful  and  hardly 
acquired  methods  of  its  accomplishment;  but 
when  our  schools  (which  in  several  of  the  cate- 
gories of  art  are  vastly  superior  to  any  that 
have  existed  before)  have  accomplished  their 
due  task,  life  itself,  either  in  its  material  or  its 
spiritual  aspect,  does  not  step  in  to  show  the 
artist  how  to  use  his  art  toward  the  highest 
ends.  In  France,  for  example,  architecture  is 
taught  more  brilliantly  and  efficiently  than 
anywhere  else  in  the  world ;  yet  when  a  young 
man  graduates  from  the  Ecole  des  Beaux  Arts 
and  seeks  to  put  into  practice  the  art  he  has 
acquired,  what  does  he  find  for  an  environ- 
ment, what  are  the  powers  and  influences  of 
society  that  are  brought  to  bear  on  him  for 

124 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

the  development  of  his  personality?  Anarchy 
thinly  veiled  by  socialistic  nomenclature;  reli- 
gion a  scorn  and  a  laughing-stock;  materialism 
supreme  in  nearly  every  department  of  life; 
education  that  is  mechanical,  and  supposedly 
scientific,  but  with  no  faintest  cognizance  of 
the  spiritual  side  of  human  nature ;  immorality 
rampant,  and  unchecked  in  its  appalling  in- 
crease. Is  it  any  wonder  that  no  French  archi- 
tect bred  in  the  Ecole  since  it  was  organized 
has  brought  into  being  any  work  whatever  that 
belongs  in  the  same  class  with  that  of  the  un- 
learned master-masons  of  the  time  four  cen- 
turies ago  when  France  was  still  a  Christian 
nation  ? 

Something  of  the  same  danger  confronts  us 
here  in  our  own  country,  though  nowhere  in  the 
world  are  the  powers  of  evil  marshalled  so  mas- 
sively against  righteousness  as  in  unhappy 
France.  So  long  as  it  is  true,  even  in  a  measure, 
that  the  obvious  and  salient  forces  of  society 
are  leagued  against  the  development  of  the 
spiritual  and  idealistic  elements  in  man,  so 
long  will  our  schools  of  art  fail  of  accomplishing 
their  mission.  They  frame  the  law,  but  right- 

125 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

eous  life  is  itself  the  "enacting  clause,"  and 
without  this,  legislation  is  inoperative. 

There  is  a  certain  hedonistic  view  of  life  that 
breeds  the  doctrine  that  art  is  the  product  of 
luxury,  culture,  and  ease.  No  more  poisonous 
heresy  was  ever  devised.  The  springs  of  art  lie 
in  right  living  and  good  citizenship  and  the 
fear  of  God.  We  may  organize  schools  of  archi- 
tecture in  every  state ;  crowd  the  villas  of  Rome 
with  ambitious  young  sculptors,  and  the  Pari- 
sian ateliers  with  potential  painters;  we  may 
patronize  poets  even  to  the  point  of  giving 
them  a  living  wage,  and  endow  opera-houses 
and  theatres  in  every  village;  our  millionaires 
may  shed  their  golden  rain  over  a  thirsty  land, 
and  public  opinion  may  demand  high  art  even 
if  it  has  to  get  it  with  an  axe  —  it  is  all 
but  "vanity;  feeding  the  wind  and  folly," 
as  Sir  Thomas  has  it,  if  beneath  it  all,  the 
only  enduring  foundation,  we  have  not  a  right 
attitude  to  ourselves,  to  our  fellows,  and  to 
God. 

But,  men  may  say,  perhaps,  this  is  the  affair 
of  the  Church  and  the  school,  of  the  teacher 
of  ethics,  the  social  reformer,  the  philosopher, 

126 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

and  the  priest.  Not  altogether,  by  any  means. 
Art,  rightly  understood,  rightly  practised,  is 
so  wonderful  a  thing  that  it  has  many  and 
varied  aspects.  Not  only  is  it  a  revelation,  it 
is  an  incentive:  not  only  is  it  the  flower,  it  is 
also  the  seed.  Every  art  is  at  the  same  time 
vocative  and  dynamic:  it  voices  the  highest  and 
the  best;  it  subtly  urges  to  emulation;  it  is 
perhaps  the  greatest  "civilizing  influence  in  the 
world.  Yet  if  it  is  a  seed,  it  must  fall  neither 
amongst  thorns,  nor  on  stony  ground,  nor  yet 
in  a  soil  so  rich  that  the  weeds  spring  up  and 
choke  it.  We  deny  this  manifest  truth  of  the 
civilizing  potency  of  art  for  the  very  reason  to 
which  I  alluded  earlier,  namely,  that  we  esti- 
mate art  by  its  highest  reaches,  and  since  these 
always  came  like  the  aftermath  of  harvest, 
when  the  fields  of  civilization  had  been  reaped 
and  the  frosts  of  winter  were  at  hand,  the  fer- 
tile seed  shrivelled  and  perished  and  the  fields 
remained  barren  and  dead.  When  art  was 
crescent,  when  it  was  the  great  outpouring 
through  the  chosen  few  of  the  spiritual  experi- 
ences of  a  people,  then  it  found  its  fertile  soil, 
and  the  reward  was  an  hundred  fold. 

127 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

If  we  believed,  —  which  God  forbid !  —  that 
we  of  this  race  and  time  and  generation  could 
offer  nothing  but  an  unfruitful  soil,  then  were 
our  labours  vain ;  but  while  we  know  we  come 
at  the  decadent  end  of  one  epoch  of  five  centu- 
ries, it  is  gloriously  true  that  we  are  at  the  very 
beginnings  of  yet  another:  the  night  is  deep, 
but  there  is  dawn  on  the  uttermost  hills.  Before 
us  lies  the  choice  of  fields  for  our  sowing :  if  we 
turn  to  those  that  are  exhausted  by  five  cen- 
turies of  reckless  husbandry,  to  the  fields  of 
materialism  and  anarchy  and  infidelity,  then 
our  future  is  without  hope ;  but  if  we  go  forward 
to  the  new  lands  of  the  new  day,  then  there  are 
no  limits  that  may  be  placed  on  our  service 
and  our  accomplishment. 

In  the  very  fact  we  deplore,  that  we  have  no 
immortal  artists  such  as  those  of  the  great 
moments  of  the  past,  lies  the  cause  of  our 
greatest  courage.  Were  this  a  time  of  art  such 
as  that  which  flung  the  radiant  glamour  of  its 
matchless  glory  over  the  charnel-house  of  the 
Italy  of  the  pagan  Renaissance,  then  we  might 
despair,  for  we  should  know  that  the  issue  was 
hopeless ;  but  because  of  this,  because  we  must 

128 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

lament  our  lack  of  art  instead  of  exulting  over 
its  triumphant  possession,  we  are  full  of  cour- 
age, knowing  that  the  tide  has  turned  and  that 
we  are  at  the  beginning  of  things,  not  at  the 
lamentable  end. 

Before  every  artist  of  this  day  and  generation 
open  limitless  and  glittering  possibilities.  There 
is  a  new  light  on  the  hills,  a  new  word  on  the 
wind,  a  new  joy  in  the  heart.  France  goes  her 
way  to  the  pit  she  has  digged;  England  crum- 
bles daily  before  our  eyes;  anarchy  looms  in 
the  Latin  countries  of  Europe ;  and  we  ourselves 
are  for  the  moment  staggered  by  persistent 
and  mordant  corruption  in  public,  private, 
commercial,  and  industrial  life;  and  yet  we 
know  these  are  the  last  things  of  an  epoch 
only,  not  of  a  race;  that  they  are  episodes  of 
a  phase  of  growth  and  sequent  decay,  not  the 
final  revelation  of  the  genius  of  a  people.  Al- 
ready, though  sometimes  in  baffling  and  devi- 
ous ways,  the  new  impulse  is  manifesting  itself: 
again  men  turn  to  religion  and  to  the  everlast- 
ing things  of  the  spirit,  to  law  and  order,  to  a 
new  righteousness  of  life.  For  ourselves,  the 
crash  of  crumbling  superstitions  and  persistent 

129 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

error:  for  our  children,  the  building  of  new 
mansions  of  righteousness  and  truth. 

Therefore,  there  is  for  the  artist  a  clear  field : 
man  is  in  revolt  against  materialism;  thinking 
thoughts  and  dreaming  dreams  and  seeing 
visions  that  cry  aloud  for  utterance  through 
that  great  agency  of  art  that  always  in  the  past 
has  answered  the  call  and  recorded  in  enduring 
monuments  all  that  makes  for  nobility  and 
righteousness  in  any  race  or  time.  Also,  the 
ground  is  prepared  for  the  sowing,  and  all  that 
art  can  do  toward  furthering  the  process  of  a 
great  regeneration  may  now  be  done  with  full 
effect.  Rightly  conceived  and  nobly  executed, 
every  work  of  art  that  is  created  in  answer  to 
the  great  new  call  of  man  may  become  an  active 
agency  in  the  momentous  crusade.  Church  and 
college  and  school  are,  it  is  true,  the  prime  edu- 
cational and  regenerating  influences,  but  no 
one  of  these  agencies,  great  as  it  is,  can  accom- 
plish its  completest  destiny  unless  it  recognizes 
the  educational  potency  of  art,  and  effects 
with  it  that  alliance  against  which  the  powers 
of  evil  cannot  prevail.  Every  church  —  nay, 
every  building  of  whatever  kind  —  that  is 

130 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

infused  with  beauty  and  significance;  every 
picture  or  statue  that  tells  of  eternal  things 
through  the  same  quality  of  sacramental 
beauty;  every  poem,  every  musical  creation, 
every  drama  that  exalts  the  sacred  and  hidden 
things  of  the  soul  over  the  flamboyant  and 
futile  phantasms  of  the  world,  becomes  a  living 
energy,  an  irresistible  influence  toward  those 
very  ends  for  the  attainment  of  which  the 
Church  and  the  school  exist. 

Art  may  no  longer  remain  "cribbed,  cab- 
ined, and  confined"  in  the  private  possession 
of  those  who  can  pay  its  price:  as  it  is  the  lan- 
guage of  the  people,  so  must  it  become  their 
free  possession.  Architecture  has  always  been 
for  all  men,  for  none  could  hide  its  light  — 
or  darkness,  perhaps  —  under  a  bushel ;  but  all 
the  other  arts  must  come  forth  into  the  open, 
and  in  the  Church,  the  school,  the  public  build- 
ings of  city  and  state,  offer  themselves  and 
their  wide  beneficence  to  all  humanity.  For 
centuries  we  have  made  great  music,  great 
pictures,  great  sculpture  either  an  appanage 
of  the  rich,  or  the  professionally  venerating 
paraphernalia  of  an  aesthetic  curiosity  shop,  — 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

to  be  seen  on  payment  of  twenty-five  cents 
on  week  days,  free  on  Sundays  and  holidays. 
This  is  the  nadir  of  civilization :  better  almost 
a  generation  that  knew  not  even  the  name  of 
art  than  one  that  so  utterly  misjudged  it  as 
so  to  misuse  it.  There  may  be  some  question 
as  to  whether  free  speech,  a  free  press,  and  the 
electoral  franchise  are  inalienable  rights  of  the 
people;  there  is  none  as  to  the  nature  of  art: 
either  it  is  the  divine  heritage  of  all  men,  or  it 
is  nothing ;  if  it  is  the  ear-mark  of  a  class,  the 
privilege  of  a  caste,  it  is  no  more  than  the 
monster  of  Frankenstein,  a  dead  horror,  moving 
and  sentient,  but  without  a  soul. 

This  also  is  a  part  of  the  duty  of  the  artist 
to  the  public,  the  giving  back  of  the  seven  old 
lamps,  heedlessly  bartered  for  new.  They  can- 
not raise  the  potent  genie  of  the  fire  and  air, 
these  new  lamps,  for  all  their  rubbing.  Give 
back  the  old  lamps,  and  once  more  the 

"  Djins  and  Afrits  of  the  enchanted  deep  " 

bow  obedient,  filling  our  hands  with  the  over- 
flowing treasures  of  the  wonderland  of  the 
spirit  and  the  soul. 

132 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

To  voice,  to  reveal,  to  prophesy;  yes,  and  to 
fight  manfully  in  the  new  crusade.  There  is 
besotted  ignorance  in  the  high  places  of  the 
city  and  the  state  and  the  nation ;  there  is  an 
illustrated  journalism  that  is  working  insidi- 
ously and  overtime  to  break  down  not  alone 
the  new-found  sense  of  beauty,  but  civilization 
itself;  there  is  a  popular  drama  —  not  the  good 
old  melodrama,  that  had  some  rough  semblance 
of  truth  and  beauty,  but  the  new  and  horrible 
thing  exploited  by  the  racial  enemies  of  Chris- 
tianity —  that  finds  its  parallel  only  in  the 
dark  annals  of  toxicology;  there  is  an  insane 
rationalism  in  painting  and  sculpture  that 
builds  on  the  mad  formula  that  the  measure 
of  art  is  its  fidelity  to  the  observed  facts  of 
nature;  there  is  the  on-rushing  pestilence  of 
bill-boards,  the  gross  humbug  of  the  art  fakir, 
and  a  score  of  other  depressing  things  of  similar 
nature  against  which  every  civilized  man  must 
contend,  but  the  artist  more  than  all,  for  each 
is  to  him  a  personal  insult,  and  he  can  see  more 
clearly  than  others  the  menace  they  are,  not 
only  to  him  and  to  his  art,  but  to  the  whole 
life  of  man  that  speaks  through  him. 

133 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

There  is  war  enough,  God  knows,  and  a 
field  for  good  fighting.  The  artist  who  cares 
for  his  art,  who  knows  what  it  means  and  why 
it  is  given  him,  knows  also  that  his  work  is  done 
not  only  in  the  studio,  but  on  the  field  of  action, 
in  fierce  fighting  against  the  marshalled  enemies 
of  society  and  civilization,  and  for  the  bringing 
back  to  the  people  of  their  long-lost  heritage. 

And  specifically  there  is  one  field  where  all 
these  ends  are  furthered  in  one:  I  refer,  of 
course,  to  art  in  its  association  with  religion. 
A  few  years  ago  there  was  not  this  possibility: 
then  religion  reviled  art  and  would  none  of  it ; 
then  also  it  was  the  fashion  to  sneer  at  relig- 
ious things  and  to  consider  them  unworthy  the 
attention  of  an  emancipated  intellect  and 
beneath  the  dignity  of  a  reputable  artist.  The 
results  were  not  such  as  to  encourage  a  per- 
sistence in  these  courses.  Now  it  is  no  longer 
fashionable  to  sneer  at  religion,  nor  is  it  a  mark 
of  intelligence.  Infidelity,  agnosticism,  indif- 
ference are  now  notes  of  an  outgrown  supersti- 
tion, while  the  Church,  roused  from  her  long 
nightmare  of  iconoclasm,  and  worse,  clamours 
for  the  aid  of  her  old  ally. 

134 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

Above  all  things  I  pray  that  she  may  have 
it,  both  for  her  own  sake  and  that  of  the  artist, 
and  that  of  society  itself.  If  art  is,  indeed,  as 
I  have  said,  one  of  the  really  great  agents  of 
civilization,  the  Church  is  preeminently  the 
place  where  its  work  may  be  made  most  effec- 
tive. Beautiful  buildings,  pictures,  and  sculp- 
ture in  schools  and  libraries,  popular  produc- 
tions of  the  Greek  and  Elizabethan  dramas, 
all  are  good  and  powerful  influences  toward 
education  and  regeneration;  but  the  Church 
is  more  than  all,  for  it  has  been,  and  is  coming 
to  be  again,  the  great  centre  of  spiritual  energy. 
Each  art  is  fine  in  itself,  but  a  great  and  beauti- 
ful church,  living  with  pictorial  and  sculptured 
decoration,  where  the  sublime,  appalling  mys- 
tery of  the  Christian  Faith  is  solemnized 
through  the  assembling  of  all  the  other  arts  — 
music,  poetry,  drama,  and  ceremonial  —  in 
one  vast,  organic  work  of  art  built  up  of  every 
one  of  them  raised  to  its  highest  level  of  possi- 
bility, and  all  fused  in  one  consummate  opus 
Dei,  —  this,  the  Catholic  Mass  in  a  Gothic 
church,  is,  in  simple  fact  and  in  plain  speech, 
the  greatest  artistic  achievement,  the  most 

135 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

perfect  proof  of  man's  divine  nature  thus  far 
recorded  in  the  annals  of  humanity. 

Here,  above  all  other  places,  art  performs 
its  highest  function,  becomes  most  intimately 
the  art  of  all  the  people,  and  gives  to  every 
artist  his  most  perfect  opportunity  both  for 
artistic  expression  and  artistic  service.  In  the 
new  epoch  that  is  even  now  at  dawn,  it  will  be, 
not  in  the  palaces  of  captains  of  industry,  or 
in  any  secular  capacity  whatever,  that  each 
and  every  art  will  find  its  opportunities  both 
for  creation  and  for  service,  but,  as  in  the  golden 
past,  in  churches  and  monastery  chapels  and 
cathedrals,  themselves  once  more  become,  as 
also  in  that  same  past,  the  most  essential, 
intimate,  and  important  single  thing  in  the 
life  of  every  man. 

Therefore,  if  the  artist  is  to  serve  the  public, 
he  must  become  the  proud  and  reverent  ally 
of  organized  religion ;  first  of  all,  winning  back 
for  himself  the  faith  filched  from  him,  and 
learning  once  more  to  speak  the  tongue  God 
gave  him  and  as  it  was  taught  him  —  whatever 
his  art  —  by  this  same  Church  herself. 

Is  this  too  great  a  thing  to  ask?  It  has 
136 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

happened  over  and  over  again  in  the  past,  and 
it  must  happen  again:  if  not  to-day,  then 
to-morrow.  Religion  and  the  sacramental 
vision  of  Absolute  Truth  and  Absolute  Beauty 
are  knit  together  by  indissoluble  bonds,  and 
with  them  art  is  involved  in  a  union  that 
neither  man  nor  devils  may  break  asunder. 
The  effort  is  made,  and  for  a  time  it  seems  to 
be  successful,  but  always  and  invariably  the 
result  is  incalculable  loss ;  to  art,  to  religion,  to 
the  world.  Religion  wavers,  yields  to  insidious 
heresies,  breaks  up  into  futile  sects,  fails  to 
enforce  its  appeal  to  men ;  while  art  loses,  first 
its  highest  ideals,  then  all  ideals  whatever;  and 
finally  follows  after  false  leaders  and  silly 
theories,  and  so  breaks  down  in  ruin.  This  is 
the  thing  that  has  happened  in  the  centuries 
that  have  followed  the  fall  of  Constantinople, 
and  now  once  more  begins  the  great  recovery, 
the  new  epoch  of  restoration:  already  the 
ground  gained  amongst  those  of  our  own 
Northern  blood  and  speech  is  enormous,  but 
it  must  continue  farther  yet, —  infinitely  farther, 
—  and  the  next  step  is  inevitable.  Alone, 
isolated,  neither  religion  nor  art  can  accom- 

137 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

plish  its  destiny,  which  is  to  seize  upon  society 
and  lift  it  to  those  heights  of  righteous  achieve- 
ment that  have  made  and  marked  the  eras  of 
the  past.  Religion  lacks  its  Pentecostal  tongue ; 
art  lacks  the  Pentecostal  flames  of  divine  in- 
spiration. The  Church  is  conscious  now  of 
what  this  alliance  will  mean,  for  herself,  for 
art,  and  for  humanity:  she  is  ready,  with  wel- 
coming hands;  and  if  the  artist  answers  in 
kind,  if  he  breaks  the  bonds  of  plausible  ma- 
terialism and  rationalism,  forsaking  the  ex- 
hausted fields  of  a  squandered  past  for  the 
fertile  soil  of  a  burgeoning  future,  then  he  will 
achieve  that  new  life  in  his  own  spirit  and  in 
his  art  that  is  the  guaranty  of  the  fulfilment  of 
the  destiny  that  brought  him  into  the  world. 

And  here  we  find  the  revelation  of  the  func- 
tion of  the  artist  in  his  relation  to  the  world ; 
in  his  choice  between  the  two  fields  offered  for 
his  sowing.  If  he  is  false  to  the  light  within 
him,  yielding  his  divine  art  for  the  pleasure  of 
the  votaries  of  pleasure;  binding  himself  in 
servitude  to  the  defiant  corruption  of  a  lost 
and  ended  cause ;  sitting  in  darkness  and  in  the 
shadow  of  death;  his  reward  is  as  theirs  and 

138 


THE  ARTIST  AND  THE  WORLD 

he  goes  down  to  his  appointed  place  with  all 
other  unfaithful  servants.  But  if  he  chooses 
otherwise,  making  himself  the  mouthpiece  of 
the  new  crusaders  who  march  ever  onward 
for  the  redemption  of  the  holy  places  of  the 
soul,  answering  the  call  of  the  best  in  man  with 
the  best  that  is  in  himself,  revealing  to  human- 
ity, through  sacred  beauty,  the  truth  that  shall 
make  men  free,  consecrating  himself  to  the 
showing,  through  whatever  art  where  God  has 
given  him  craft,  "the  light  which  lighteth 
every  man  that  cometh  into  the  world, "  then, 
for  a  time  his  reward  may  be  poor  in  material 
measure,  but  in  the  end  for  him  is  reserved 
that  crown  of  righteousness  that  is  for  them 
that  are  faithful  and  true,  and  that  serve  God 
through  the  serving  of  them  that  He  made  in 
His  image  and  redeemed  in  the  darkness  and  the 
thunderings  of  Calvary. 


V 

THE  CRAFTSMAN  AND  THE  ARCHITECT 


THE  CRAFTSMAN  AND  THE  ARCHITECT1 

IN  its  last  Annual  Report  the  Committee  on 
Education  of  the  American  Institute  of 
Architects  laid  particular  emphasis  on  the  re- 
lationship between  the  architect  and  the  crafts- 
man, pointed  out  the  almost  complete  lack  of 
good  artificers  in  America  and  the  shocking 
disparity  between  educational  agencies  in  Eu- 
rope and  this  country,  and  urged  upon  the 
architectural  profession  the  paramount  neces- 
sity of  taking  heed  of  the  existing  condition 
and  the  necessity  of  amending  it  without  delay. 
The  Report  said  in  part :  — 

From  time  to  time  we  have  referred  more  or 
less  casually  to  the  fact  that  while  we  have  the 
most  copious  and  widespread  architectural  edu- 
cation to  be  found  in  any  country,  we  have  practi- 
cally no  agencies  for  the  education  of  craftsmen. 
The  result  must  be,  and  is,  extremely  injurious, 
if  not  fatal,  to  architecture  itself.  We  may  on 

1  Address  at  the  convention  of  the  American  Federation 
of  Arts  in  Washington. 

143 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

paper  create  visions  that  rival  those  of  Coleridge's 
Kubla  Khan;  we  may  on  arising  from  a  weary 
drawing  board,  our  creative  task  accomplished, 
say  with  Justinian  (and  believe  ourselves  in  the 
saying),  "Solomon,  I  have  surpassed  thee,"  but 
when  we  see  our  drawings  and  our  designs  ma- 
terialized in  three  dimensions  we  realize  that, 
were  we  buried  within  their  walls,  the  globe- 
trotting New  Zealander,  a  century  hence,  looking 
for  our  personal  monuments,  would  hardly  say 
with  Sir  Christopher's  eulogist,  "Circumspice." 
In  the  good  old  days  when  an  architectural 
monument  was  a  plexus  of  all  the  arts,  the  archi- 
tect was  pretty  much  at  the  mercy  of  the  crafts- 
man, and  he  still  is,  with  a  difference;  for  then 
every  bit  of  sculpture  or  painting  or  carving  or 
metal-work  and  joinery,  and  glass  and  needle- 
work—  when  these  latter  came  into  play  — 
enhanced  the  architecture,  glorified  it,  and 
sometimes  redeemed  it  as  well;  now  either  our 
carving  is  butchered,  our  sculpture  and  painting 
conceived  on  lines  that  deny  their  architectural 
setting,  our  metal-work  turned  out  by  the  com- 
mercial ton,  our  stained-glass  work  defiant  of 
every  law  of  God,  man,  or  architect,  or  it  is  all 
reduced  to  a  dead  level  of  technical  plausibility, 
without  an  atom  of  feeling  or  artistry  —  and  we 
are  glad  to  take  it  this  way,  for  the  sake  of  escap- 
ing worse. 

Every   architect   knows   that   the   success   or 
failure  of  his  work  depends  largely  on  the  crafts- 

144 


CRAFTSMAN  AND  ARCHITECT 

men  who  carry  it  out  and  complete  it  with  all 
its  decorative  features  of  form  and  colour,  and 
yet  in  a  nation  of  one  hundred  million  people, 
with  a  dozen  schools  of  architecture,  practically 
nothing  is  done  toward  educating  these  same 
craftsmen,  and  we  either  secure  the  services  of 
foreign-trained  men,  accept  tenth-rate  native 
work,  or  go  without.  Take  a  case  in  point;  it  is 
decided  to  build  a  metropolitan  cathedral,  with 
little  regard  to  cost;  plans  are  made  (we  will  say 
satisfactorily),  —  what  then?  If  it  is  to  be  a  great 
and  comprehensive  work  of  art  it  needs  (and 
exactly  as  much  as  it  needs  its  architect)  sculptors, 
painters,  carvers  in  wood  and  stone,  glassmakers, 
mosaicists,  embroiderers,  leather-workers.  Are 
there  enough  schools  in  America  to  train  all  the 
craftsmen  needed  on  this  one  monument,  is  there 
one  school,  and  if  so,  where?  One  of  the  foolish 
arguments  against  Gothic  is  that  it  is  quite  de- 
pendent on  artist  craftsmen,  and  as  we  have 
none  we  must  abandon  the  style;  one  of  the 
foolish  arguments  in  favour  of  Classical  design 
is  that  anybody  can  learn  to  carve  an  acanthus, 
therefore  we  had  better  stick  to  what  we  know  we 
can  do.  Neither  argument  is  sound;  if  we  have 
no  artist-craftsmen,  then  it  would  be  better  for 
us  to  close  up  half  the  schools  that  are  turning 
out  architects  and  employ  the  funds  for  the 
training  of  the  only  men  who  can  give  life  to  the 
architects'  designs. 
Apart  from  the  industrial  arts  in  their  rela- 

145 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

tionship  to  architecture,  their  importance  in  this 
country,  where  art  manufactures  or  products 
are  so  enormously  in  demand,  is  too  obvious  to 
need  demonstration.  Nearly  all  our  expert  labour 
in  the  artistic  trades  is  imported  from  Europe. 
We  pay  large  wages  to  foreign  workmen,  but 
refuse  to  educate  our  own  people  so  that  this 
financial  benefit  may  accrue  to  them.  In  other 
words,  our  prosperity  results  in  benefiting  the 
alien,  and  we  allow  our  own  citizens  to  degenerate, 
furnishing  no  new  employment  for  the  rising 
generation,  but  fitting  it  only  for  those  limited 
callings  which  are  already  overstocked,  and  in 
which  it  can  command  but  a  minimum  wage. 

The  Report  then  summarized  the  educational 
activities  of  France,  so  far  as  the  arts  allied 
with  architecture  are  concerned,  and  although 
even  there  some  of  the  most  important  crafts 
are  as  yet  unrecognized,  it  appeared  that  in 
three  alone  there  were  in  Paris  four  hundred 
and  twenty-five  students  with  an  annual  budget 
of  seventy-two  thousand  dollars.  It  then  con- 
sidered what  is  being  done  (or  not  done)  in 
New  York  in  the  line  of  architectural  modelling 
and  painting,  and  after  showing  its  extreme 
inadequacy,  it  continued :  — 

Now,  if  all  this  is  true  of  architectural  model- 
146 


CRAFTSMAN  AND  ARCHITECT 

ling  and  painting,  it  is  at  least  equally  true  of 
the  other  arts,  such  as  wood-carving,  the  making 
of  stained  glass,  and  metal-work  of  all  kinds; 
obviously  little  is  done  educationally  in  any  of 
those  directions,  and  as  a  consequence  when  we 
want  really  good  work  we  go  abroad  for  it,  or 
employ  foreign-trained  men  who  have  taken  up 
their  residence  in  this  country.  Some  time  ago, 
a  member  of  this  Committee  was  asked  to  give 
a  list  of  artist-craftsmen  who  were  competent 
in  design  and  execution,  and  who  were  willing 
to  work  with  due  regard  to  the  architectural 
environment  of  their  products;  he  reported  that 
there  were  two  Americans  who  were  doing  well 
as  beginners  in  stained  glass,  but  that  it  would 
be  safer  to  go  to  England  where  the  ancient 
tradition  in  design  and  workmanship  still  main- 
tains in  a  measure;  he  named  two  good  sculptors 
in  wood,  one  a  Bavarian,  one  a  German;  one  ad- 
mirable iron-worker,  a  German;  one  goldsmith, 
an  Englishman;  and  two  architectural  sculptors, 
one  a  Welshman,  the  other  American. 

Of  course,  this  is  all  wrong;  there  should  be 
an  hundred  craftsmen  in  each  category,  if  archi- 
tectural dreams  are  to  be  properly  materialized 
and  embellished,  and  these  should  be  our  own 
people,  not  imported  aliens,  however  competent 
they  may  be. 

It  should  be  understood  that  we  are  not  refer- 
ring to  the  sculptor  and  painter  as  architectural 
allies;  we  have  great  men  in  both  categories,  and 

147 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

their  relationship  to  the  profession  was  considered 
by  the  Committee  on  Allied  Arts  of  last  year; 
we  are  speaking  of  the  craftsmen  whose  work 
enters  more  intimately  into  the  ordinary  archi- 
tectural practice,  and  so  speaking  we  do  not 
hesitate  to  say  that  the  present  state  of  things 
is  barbarous,  uneconomical,  and  in  the  last  de- 
gree discreditable  to  the  architectural  profession. 

"Barbarous,  uneconomical,  and  discredita- 
ble, "  these  words  are  none  too  strong  to  apply 
to  a  condition  of  things  which  has  endured  for 
long,  and  even  now  fails  to  arouse  indignation, 
or  even  a  measure  of  recognition.  I  could  make 
a  strong  case  against  the  present  system,  or 
lack  of  system,  on  economic  grounds  alone, 
showing  how  unpatriotic,  unbusinesslike,  and 
unpractical  it  is  for  America  to  deny  to  its  own 
citizens  a  field  of  work  that  is  remunerative 
and  that  must  be  filled,  so  putting  a  premium 
on  the  alien  workman  who  has  been  able  to 
acquire  his  dominant  proficiency  in  his  native 
and  more  generous  land;  a  strong  case  also 
against  the  labour  unions  that  disparage  the 
apprentice  system,  and  discourage  the  spirit 
of  emulation  that  results  in  individual  advance- 
ment and  consequently  increased  returns  to 

148 


CRAFTSMAN  AND  ARCHITECT 

the  specially  able  men;  a  strong  case,  finally, 
against  a  system  that  simply  means  that  for 
many  products  of  the  artist-craftsman  the 
owner  or  architect  must  perforce  go  across 
the  ocean,  paying  his  money  not  even  into  the 
hands  of  foreign-born  American  citizens,  but  to 
foreign  residents,  and  then  paying  his  further 
tax  as  well  to  the  National  Government  for 
the  protection  of  American  producers,  who,  so 
far  as  the  essential  element  in  the  product  is 
concerned,  —  quality,  —  simply  do  not  exist. 

It  would  be  interesting  to  go  into  the  matter 
in  detail  and  show  the  barbarism  and  the  dull 
ignorance  of  the  present  condition,  but,  for  the 
moment,  I  must  waive  this  and  confine  myself 
to  the  matter  that  more  closely  affects  the 
owner  and  the  architect,  and  that  is  the  heavy 
handicap  that  is  placed  on  every  one,  lay  or 
professional,  who  tries  to  create  some  work  of 
art  that  shall  be  not  only  acceptable  in  idea, 
but  even  tolerable  in  its  working-out. 

Now,  why  is  it  that  in  spite  of  the  most  com- 
plete and  effective  architectural  education  the 
world  has  ever  known,  wealth  that  could  buy 
the  labour  that  built  the  pyramids,  that  made 

149 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

Chartres  Cathedral  almost  a  revelation  of 
Divinity,  and  fretted  the  lacey  fabric  of  the 
Taj  Mahal,  and  as  many  practising  architects 
in  the  directory  of  a  great  city  as  all  Europe 
numbered  during  the  whole  epoch  of  medi- 
aevalism,  —  how  is  it  that  with  these  notable 
advantages  we  cannot  succeed  in  building  one 
structure  to  match  a  minor  Greek  temple, 
a  second-class  mediaeval  monastery,  or  a  pro- 
vincial Buddhist  shrine  of  twelfth-century 
Japan?  There  are,  I  think,  three  reasons;  the 
first  two  do  not  concern  us  at  this  moment, 
the  third  very  much  does.  I  name  the  two  first, 
for  nobody  can  stop  me,  —  an  abandonment 
of  definite  and  concrete  and  inspiring  religious 
conviction,  and  our  disregard  of  the  sound 
principles  of  law  and  order  and  obedience,  — 
and  having  named  them,  we  shall  hear  no  more 
of  them  at  this  time.  The  third  is  precisely 
that  which  is  the  subject  of  this  paper,  the 
disappearance  of  the  individual,  independent, 
and  self-respecting  craftsman,  and  by  this 
third  loss,  we  are  left  helpless  and  hopeless, 
indeed;  for  as  the  Renaissance  demonstrates, 
the  real  craftsman  can  do  much,  as  he  did  do 
150 


CRAFTSMAN  AND  ARCHITECT 

much,  to  make  amends  for  the  loss  of  greater 
things,  and,  so  long  as  he  endures,  as  through 
the  Renaissance  he  did  endure,  can  raise  an 
inferior  architecture  to  a  level  of  credit  that  in 
itself  it  could  not  claim,  while  giving  to  an 
equally  inferior  civilization  a  glamour  of  glory 
that  rightly  could  not  proceed  from  its  own 
inherent  nature. 

We  may  sit  spellbound  before  the  august 
majesty  of  the  Ecole  des  Beaux  Arts,  and  to 
it,  by  grace  of  a  generous  French  Government, 
we  may  send  our  boys  by  hundreds;  we  may 
found,  equip,  and  endow  schools  of  architect- 
ure in  every  college  in  America;  we  may  rear 
architectural  museums  in  every  state,  estab- 
lish architectural  lectureships  that  will  subject 
the  railways  to  an  unfair  test  of  their  carrying 
capacity,  and  crowd  the  transatlantic  steam- 
ships with  eager  holders  of  travelling  student- 
ships, —  it  will  be  of  little  avail  if  we  cannot 
entrust  our  dreams  and  our  working  drawings 
to  genuine  craftsmen  for  the  carrying-out,  but 
instead  find  ourselves  compelled  to  hand  them 
over  to  the  tender  mercies  of  general  con- 
tractors, "Ecclesiastical  Art  Decorators  and 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

Furnishers,"  and  department  stores  where 
the  watchwords  are  "efficiency,"  division  of 
labour,  and  "You  give  us  sketches.  We  do  the 


rest." 


,  By  itself  architecture  is  nothing;  allied  with 
the  structural  crafts  and  the  artist  crafts,  it 
is  everything,  —  the  greatest  art  in  the  world ; 
for  it  is  a  plexus  of  all  the  arts;  it  assembles 
them  in  a  great  synthesis  that  is  vaster  than 
any  art  by  -itself  alone,  that  gathers  them 
together  in  the  perfect  service  of  God  and  man. 
Without  the  craftsman  an  architectural  de- 
sign is  worth  little  more  than  the  paper  on 
which  it  is  drawn;  it  is  an  ephemera,  a  simu- 
lacrum of  glory.  From  a  distance,  or  at  first 
sight,  it  may  have  majesty  of  form,  power  of 
composition,  impressiveness  of  silhouette,  and 
richness  of  light  and  shade,  but  close  at  hand,  it 
is  a  dead  thing,  without  a  vivifying  soul,  and 
it  neither  reveals  the  heart  of  a  people,  nor  eats 
itself  into  their  affections  so  that  for  them  or 
their  successors  it  becomes  what  to  us  to-day 
are  the  monuments  of  Greece  and  Byzantium 
and  the  Catholic  Middle  Ages.  With  the  artist- 
craftsman,  working  independently  but  in  close 

152 


CRAFTSMAN  AND  ARCHITECT 

alliance,  we  may  have  again  a  San  Marco,  a 
Chartres,  or  a  Seville  —  if,  as  well,  our  faith 
and  our  works  are  as  those  of  them  that  built 
those  wonders  and  enriched  them  with  their 
splendour  of  decoration. 

We  exercise  ourselves  over  the  manifold 
questions  of  the  faculties  and  the  curriculums 
of  the  architectural  schools  in  which  we  take 
such  justifiable  pride;  we  found  one  scholar- 
ship after  another,  and  incessantly  multiply 
our  architectural  lectureships  and  exhibitions; 
we  even  animatedly  discuss  the  possibility  of 
that  plainly  desirable  thing,  —  a  post-graduate 
school  of  architecture  in  Washington ;  and  all 
the  while  we  see  with  equanimity  our  designs 
butchered  or  frozen  to  death,  our  ornaments 
and  furnishings  provided  by  others  than  our 
own  people,  and  usually  in  a  perfectly  com- 
mercial and  mechanical  manner  at  that;  and 
finally  we  are  content  that  our  buildings  should 
become,  not  the  rich  and  opulent  showing- 
forth  of  a  great  civilization  through  innumer- 
able allied  arts,  but,  instead,  academic  essays 
in  theoretical  design  expressing  nothing  but 
the  genius  —  or  otherwise  —  of  the  architect, 

153 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

even  to  the  machine-chiselled  carving,  the 
stencilled  colour  and  the  cast-plaster  ornaments, 
all  from  his  own  full-size  designs  worked  out 
by  his  own  draughtsmen. 

Think  how  the  carved  capitals  of  Lincoln, 
the  statues  of  Wells  and  of  Rheims,  the  inlay 
of  Monreale,  the  mosaics  of  Ravenna  and  of 
the  Trastevere,  the  glass  of  Bourges  and  of 
Chartres,  the  frescoes  of  Assisi,  the  grilles  and 
"retables"  of  Seville  and  of  Salamanca  and  of 
Mexico,  the  joinery  of  Henry  the  Seventh's 
Chapel  and  of  Toledo,  the  metal-work  of 
Nuremberg  —  consider  how  all  these  were 
made,  and  why  and  when,  and  then  exult  over 
our  triumphant  civilization,  or  marvel  that  all 
the  wealth  and  all  the  architects  and  artists 
of  the  world  could  not  rival  to-day  or  equal  the 
Capella  Palatina  in  Palermo,  which  was  merely 
the  private  chapel  of  a  second-rate  prince,  in  a 
frontier  land  in  the  dusk  of  the  Dark  Ages. 

Of  course,  the  basic  reason  for  this  deplorable 
condition  of  things  is  economic;  it  finds  its 
root  in  the  fantastic  substitution,  during  and 
after  the  Renaissance,  in  place  of  a  communism 
that  developed  true  personality,  of  an  indivi- 

154 


CRAFTSMAN  AND  ARCHITECT 

dualism  that  destroyed  personality.  As  the 
splendid  liberty  of  v  mediaeval  society  has  hard- 
ened into  a  mechanical  and  irresponsible  des- 
potism that  preserves  only  the  empty  name 
of  liberty,  so  the  triumphant  individuality  of 
the  Renaissance  has  hardened  into  an  economic 
system  that,  through  mechanics,  capitalism, 
the  wage  system,  and  division  of  labour,  has 
become  a  very  sordid  kind  of  slavery.  To  effect 
a  vital,  comprehensive,  and  enduring  reform, 
we  should  have  to  strike  deep,  and  elsewhere 
than  in  the  domain  of  art;  but  something  can 
be  done  in  a  tentative  and  partial  sort  of  way, 
pending  the  coming  of  that  inevitable  revolt 
and  revolution  that  will  "make  all  things  new," 
for  in  minor  ways,  both  the  public  that  builds 
and  the  architect  that  serves  this  public  are  to 
blame.  As  a  result  of  the  economic  revolution 
of  the  past  three  centuries,  the  architect  has 
fallen  into  the  habit  of  thinking  that  architec- 
ture is  all  there  is  to  architecture;  that  planes 
and  contours  and  spacings  of  light  and  shade 
make  up  his  art ;  that  ornament  and  furnishings 
are  adventitious,  anyway;  and  that,  in  any 
case,  whatever  is  to  be  done  by  way  of  embel- 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

lishment  can  best  be  done  by  highly  specialized 
draughtsmen,  under  his  own  direction,  with 
adequate  photographs  and  reliable  books  and 
plenty  of  brown  paper,  charcoal,  and  tube 
colours,  —  together  with  a  system  of  supervis- 
ing the  human  and  mechanical  engines  that 
turn  these  two-dimension  creations  into  three 
dimensions  during  an  eight-hour  day  and  sub- 
ject to  the  regulations  of  the  labour  unions. 

Well,  perhaps  it  can  —  as  conditions  now 
are;  but  if  so  we  had  better  change  the  condi- 
tions. Just  so  long  as  the  architect  makes  a 
blanket  contract  with  a  general  contractor,  or 
turns  over  his  carving  and  sculpture  to  a  well- 
capitalized  corporation  of  stone-masons,  or 
abandons  his  colour  embellishment  to  some 
plausible  organization  of  "decorators,"  or  his 
church  or  palace  to  an  august  Fifth  Avenue 
establishment,  or  his  windows  and  his  metal- 
work  to  an  admirably  advertised  syndicate  of 
artists  with  sufficient  capital  behind  it  to  in- 
sure easy  and  pleasant  conditions  for  all  con- 
cerned, —  just  so  long  will  he  produce  nothing 
that  will  outlast  his  lifetime,  or  give  joy  to  any 
one  concerned. 


CRAFTSMAN  AND  ARCHITECT 

For  it  is  not  a  case  of  no  alternative ;  there  are 
real  craftsmen  living  to-day,  and  in  this  coun- 
try, and  turning  out  exquisite  work  after  the 
ancient  fashion,  though  Heaven  knows  why  it 
should  be  so.  I  know  three  makers  of  tiles  and 
other  products  of  burnt  clay  and  glazes,  who 
are  consummate  artists  (one  of  them  is  a 
woman),  and  who  are  to  be  dealt  with  only  as 
individuals,  and  who,  if  they  are  treated  as 
allies,  not  as  commercial  purveyors  of  trade 
goods,  can  glorify  any  building  with  which  they 
come  in  contact ;  I  know  two  workers  in  forged 
and  wrought  iron  who  are  blood  brothers  of 
Adam  Kraft;  three  goldsmiths  who  would 
gladden  the  heart  of  Cellini ;  a  woodcarver  who 
is  Peter  Vischer  restored  to  life ;  two  sculptors 
who  are  really  architectural  sculptors  as  were 
the  men  who  immortalized  Chartres  and  Wells ; 
a  stone  cutter  whose  craft  matches  that  of  the 
masons  of  Venice  and  Rouen ;  a  maker  of  stained 
glass  who  needs  only  opportunity  to  restore 
some  measure  of  the  wonder  of  this  lost  art ;  a 
maker  of  ecclesiastical  vestments  whose  needle- 
work is  that  of  the  fifteenth  century;  a  scribe 
who  can  do  real  missals  and  other  illumina- 

157 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

tion  as  these  once  were  done  long  ago.  And 
not  one  of  them  has  really  enough  to  keep 
him  busy  or  return  him  more  than  a  living 
wage,  while  by  default  thousands  of  dollars 
worth  of  work  they  could  do  consummately 
goes  weekly  to  factories  and  similar  places 
where  it  becomes  simply  so  much  plausible 
sham. 

Now,  it  is  the  manifest  duty  of  the  architect 
to  search  out  these  individual  craftsmen  and  to 
bring  them  into  alliance  with  himself.  You  will 
note  that  I  speak  of  an  "alliance,"  for  this  is 
almost  the  crux  of  the  whole  matter ;  whoever 
the  craftsman  is  he  must  work  with  and  not  for 
the  architect,  although  the  latter  must  exercise 
a  general  oversight  over  everything,  and  form 
in  a  sense  the  court  of  last  resort.  Really  an 
architect  is,  or  should  be,  more  a  coordinator 
than  a  general  designer;  he  should  be  a  kind  of 
universal  solvent,  by  means  of  which  architec- 
tural designers,  workmen,  artificers,  craftsmen, 
and  artists  should  come  together,  and,  while 
preserving  their  own  personality,  merge  their 
identity  in  a  great  artistic  whole,  somewhat  as 
the  instruments  of  a  great  orchestra  are  as- 

158 


CRAFTSMAN  AND  ARCHITECT 

sembled  to  the  perfect  rendering  of  a  sym- 
phony by  the  master  and  conductor. 

This  free  field  for  the  exercise  of  personality 
was  always  accorded  the  artist  and  the  crafts- 
man during  that  greatest  and  most  successful 
of  building  epochs,  the  Middle  Ages,  and  that 
it  is  now  denied  is  due  quite  as  much  to  the 
grasping  nature  of  the  architect  as  it  is  to 
the  progressive  degeneracy  of  the  craftsman. 
The  two  elements  are  interrelated ;  as  the  crafts- 
man decayed,  the  architect  more  and  more  took 
into  his  own  hands  the  work  he  could  not  get 
well  done  elsewhere,  and  as  he  did  so  he  dis- 
couraged and  destroyed  the  craftsman  already 
on  the  downward  path. 

Now,  there  is  no  reason  why  the  architect 
should  have  to  design  his  carving  and  tiles  and 
glass  and  metal-work  and  joinery  and  colour 
decoration,  except  that  no  one  else  can  do  it, 
and  when  he  does,  by  default,  the  result  is 
only  a  poor  and  unenduring  expedient.  Now 
that  true  craftsmen  are  beginning  to  emerge 
from  the  welter  of  commercialism,  it  is,  as  I 
have  said,  the  manifest  duty  of  the  architect  to 
search  them  out  and  give  them  not  only  the 

159 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

preference,  but  the  utmost  measure  of  liberty 
of  action  of  which  they  are  worthy.  What  we 
are  looking  for,  and  what  was  always  obtained 
in  the  epochs  of  high  civilization,  is  not  merely 
technical  proficiency,  but  such  proficiency 
united  to  creative  capacity.  There  is  no  true 
craftsman  who  is  not  the  personal  designer  of 
what  he  fashions,  and  it  is  the  negation  of  this 
principle  that  vitiates  so  much  of  the  work 
produced  through  the  so-called  "arts  and 
crafts"  societies  of  the  present  day.  For  my 
own  part,  I  have  lost  much  of  my  confidence  in 
a  movement  that  once  seemed  to  promise  so 
much,  just  because  I  have  found  there  the  same 
old  vicious  system ;  one  man  making  the  design, 
the  other  carrying  it  out.  This  is  fatal,  and  I 
believe  that  the  arts  and  crafts  movement  is 
doomed  to  immediate  failure  unless  it  prohibits 
absolutely  the  showing  or  selling  or  approval  of 
any  work  that  is  not  fashioned  by  the  man  who 
designed  it,  or  is  not  designed  by  the  man  who 
fashioned  it. 

It  is  better  to  accept  work  that  is  in  a  meas- 
ure defective,  if  it  is  so  created,  than  a  more 
perfect  and  plausible  product  that  involves 

160 


CRAFTSMAN  AND  ARCHITECT 

division  of  labour.  I  have  in  mind  a  certain 
woodcarver  who  cuts  his  statues  directly  from 
baulks  of  oak,  without  the  intervention  of 
either  sketch  or  model,  and  though  I  am  not 
always  wholly  in  sympathy  with  what  he  does, 
though  sometimes  there  is  a  naivete  in  what  he 
does  that  would  scandalize  a  trained  sculptor 
or  a  purist  architect,  I  would  not  change  this 
for  a  moment;  for  if  I  did,  it  would  mean  the 
achievement  of  efficiency  and  regularity  at  the 
expense  of  a  better  thing,  and  that  is  person- 
ality. 

Of  course,  there  are  at  present  very  few  men 
who  can  be  trusted  implicitly,  but  there  are 
many  who  have,  and  show,  promise  of  possible 
development,  and  such  men  should  be  en- 
couraged and  given  the  widest  possible  latitude. 
They  will  repay  this  confidence  tenfold,  and 
considerate  guidance  linked  with  confidence 
and  opportunity  will  give  surprising  results.  I 
should  like  to  suggest,  therefore,  that  a  kind  of 
"White  List"  be  compiled  and  published,  and 
added  to  from  time  to  time,  of  those  craftsmen 
who  have  shown  the  ability  and  the  promise ; 
that  it  be  given  the  widest  publicity  amongst 

161 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

architects,  and  that  they  should  consider  them- 
selves bound  in  honour  to  go  to  these  men,  and 
work  with  them,  rather  than  over  them,  in 
preference  to  the  more  august  and  widely 
heralded  concerns  that  commend  themselves 
rather  by  their  financial  than  their  artistic 
capital. 

In  the  end,  and  that  we  may  finally  get  back 
to  the  old  and  ideal  state  of  things,  we  shall 
have  to  restore  the  ancient  guild  idea,  and  as 
well  the  workshops  assembled  around  some 
great  architectural  undertaking.  If  a  cathedral 
is  to  be  built,  or  a  university,  or  a  public  library, 
with  the  turning  of  the  first  sod  should  go  the 
raising  of  temporary  workshops,  and  the  as- 
sembling of  the  varied  workers  that  will  be 
brought  into  play  for  the  embellishing  of  the 
fabric.  Think  what  a  future  cathedral  close 
might  be ;  in  the  midst,  the  slowly  rising  walls, 
and  all  around,  busy  workshops;  here  a  group 
of  stone-carvers  under  a  competent  foreman 
(but  minus  special  designers  and  modellers), 
surrounded  by  casts  and  photographs  and 
drawings  of  the  carving  of  Chartres  and  Rheims 
and  Venice  and  Wells  and  Lincoln ;  here  glass- 

162 


CRAFTSMAN  AND  ARCHITECT 

workers  with  their  models  from  Bourges  and 
Chartres  and  York,  slowly  fashioning  (each 
man  his  own  window)  the  jewelled  filling  for  the 
tracerized  apertures  of  the  temple ;  here  join- 
ers and  woodworkers  with  the  same  kind  of 
surroundings,  and  workers  in  wrought  and 
forged  iron,  and  in  gold  and  silver;  tilemakers, 
with  their  Dutch  and  Persian  and  Spanish 
models;  and  so  on,  until  all  the  varied  list  is 
filled.  Each  group  would  form  its  own  inde- 
pendent guild,  self-governing,  self-controlled; 
all  united  then  in  a  general  guild  which  would 
have  a  broad  supervision  of  all  that  was  done, 
and  provide  models,  books,  teachers,  while  the 
architect  Jiimself  would  go  daily  through  all 
the  works,  suggesting  here,  correcting  there, 
inspiring  everywhere.  And  with  the  primary 
craft  activity  would  go  also  certain  social  ele- 
ments, that  would  bind  the  several  guilds  to- 
gether and  give  them  coordination ;  educational 
elements,  religious  elements,  and  those  features 
of  assurance  against  loss  through  sickness  and 
of  participation  in  a  division  of  profits,  that 
were  fundamental  in  the  guilds  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  Can  there  be  any  doubt  as  to  the  result? 

163 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

If  such  a  thing  as  that  could  come  into  being  in 
connection  with  one  great  contemporary  build- 
ing, it  would  mean  that  the  problem  was  solved, 
and  that  for  the  future  there  would  be  enough 
real  craftsmen  and  a  better  art,  and  a  higher 
civilization. 

You  will  say  this  is  a  dream  impossible  of 
achievement;  that  no  owner  would  for  a  mo- 
ment think  of  financing  such  a  venture;  that 
enough  workmen  could  not  be  found  to  man 
any  one  of  the  workshops  even  if  an  adequate 
foreman  could  be  obtained;  that  the  idea  of 
team  work  has  so  utterly  died  out  of  a  hyper- 
individualized  generation  that  a  communal 
spirit  could  not  be  built  up;  and  that  such  a 
scheme,  if  started,  would  immediately  disin- 
tegrate through  jealousy,  suspicion,  and  ava- 
rice; and  finally  that  the  labour  unions  would 
refuse  to  permit  anything  of  the  kind  and  would 
destroy  it,  if  initiated,  by  the  simple  method  of 
calling  a  strike  amongst  the  labourers  on  the 
works  but  outside  the  guilds. 

I  admit  the  force  only  of  the  last  claim,  and 
even  here  I  think  it  is  exaggerated.  I  cannot 
believe  that  organized  labour  could  be  so  short- 

164. 


CRAFTSMAN  AND  ARCHITECT 

sighted  as  to  fail  to  see  that  such  a  scheme  was 
quite  in  harmony  with  the  high  ideals  they 
openly  avow ;  and  if  they  were,  I  am  sure  the 
time  is  close  at  hand  when  the  growing  force  of 
public  opinion  will  suppress  with  a  heavy  hand 
the  corruptions  of  unionism  which  are  so  un- 
representative of,  and  injurious  to,  its  better 
principles. 

However  this  may  be,  the  thing  must  come 
and  will  come,  for  we  cannot  much  longer  sub- 
mit to  a  condition  so  unwholesome  and  so  de- 
plorable in  its  results,  or  even  to  a  type  of  civili- 
zation that  makes  this  condition  inevitable. 
If  individualism  or  commercialism  or  division 
of  labour  or  the  trade  unions  stand  in  the  way, 
they  will  be  swept  out  of  existence,  going  down 
in  defeat  before  the  resolution  that  will  surely  in 
its  progress  bring  back  again  many  of  the  old 
conditions  that  marked,  as  they  will  ever  mark, 
estates  of  high  civilization.  In  the  mean  time, 
we  can  —  and  I  close  as  I  began  —  do  much 
toward  the  amelioration  of  no  longer  endurable 
conditions,  much  even  toward  the  bringing-in 
of  the  great  and  fundamental  reforms.  I  doubt 
if  the  state  can  do  this,  for  its  achievements  in 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

the  line  of  popular  education  are  not  such  as  to 
enlist  confidence;  it  is  too  blackly  tarred  with 
the  same  stick  of  secularism,  mechanism,  and 
the  division  of  labour.  I  doubt  if  the  schools 
and  colleges  can  do  it,  or  would  do  it.  But  the 
architect  can,  and  the  owner,  for  both  can  make 
the  demand  and  foster  and  further  the  supply. 
It  is  to  them,  therefore,  that  we  must  turn  in 
our  emergency;  to  the  owner,  in  the  hope  that 
he  will  demand  real  craftsmanship  and  accept 
no  commercial  or  syndicated  substitute;  to  the 
architect,  in  the  confidence  that  he  will  search 
out  the  individual  craftsman,  give  him  the  pre- 
ference, and  accord  him  the  greatest  measure  of 
liberty  of  which  he  is  worthy  —  and  even  a 
little  more.  And  in  these  hopes  we  shall  not  be 
disappointed,  for  once  the  condition  is  recog- 
nized there  is  no  alternative,  —  action,  imme- 
diate, comprehensive,  and  persistent,  becomes  a 
matter  of  honour. 


VI 

AMERICAN    UNIVERSITY    ARCHITECTURE 


VI 

AMERICAN    UNIVERSITY    ARCHITECTURE1 

IT  would  be  impossible  for  me  to  express  in 
any  adequate  fashion  my  deep  apprecia- 
tion of  the  honour  you  do  me  in  asking  me  to 
supplement,  in  some  small  degree,  the  penetrat- 
ing and  comprehensive  paper  Mr.  Warren  al- 
ready has  read  before  you,  with  a  consideration 
and  a  showing  of  that  other  collegiate  architec- 
ture over-seas  which,  as  he  so  justly  says,  is 
in  its  impulse  and  its  achievement  a  natural 
continuation  of  British  tradition.  We  have  in 
America,  as  you  in  your  colonies,  the  residential 
college  —  the  early,  the  perfect,  the  indestruct- 
ible type  —  elsewhere  abandoned,  and  with 
great  loss  in  respect  to  those  results  in  charac- 
ter-building (and  therefore  national  civiliza- 
tion) for  which  no  intensive  scholarship  can 
ever  make  amends.  The  foundations  of  sane 
and  sound  and  wholesome  society  are  neither 

1  Read  before  the  Royal  Institute  of  British  Architects, 
London,  1912. 

169 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

industrial  supremacy,  nor  world-wide  trade,  nor 
hoarded  wealth ;  they  are  personal  honour,  clean 
living,  fearlessness  in  action,  self-reliance, 
generosity  of  impulse,  good-fellowship,  obedi- 
ence to  law,  reverence,  and  the  fear  of  God,  — 
all  those  elements  which  are  implied  in  the 
word  "character,"  which  is  the  end  of  educa- 
tion and  which  is  the  proudest  product  of  the 
old  English  residential  college,  and  the  old 
English  educational  idea  that  brought  it  into 
being,  maintained  it  for  centuries,  and  holds  it 
now  a  bulwark  against  the  tides  of  anarchy  and 
materialism  that  threaten  the  very  endurance 
of  civilization  itself. 

From  time  to  time  we  have  yielded  more  or 
less  to  novel  impulses,  coquetting  with  that 
questionable  lady  sometimes  known  as  the 
"Spirit  of  the  Age,"  accepting  even  her  insidi- 
ous doctrine  that,  after  all,  the  object  of  educa- 
tion is  not  the  building  of  character,  but  the 
breeding  of  intensive  specialists,  or  the  turning 
of  a  boy  at  the  earliest  possible  moment  into  a 
wage-earning  animal.  We  still  hold  to  the  dam- 
nable opinion  that  education  may  be  divorced 
from  religion,  and  ethics  inculcated  apart  from  a 

170 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

dogmatic  religious  faith,  and  having  sown  the 
wind  of  an  insane  secularism,  we  are  reaping 
the  whirlwind  of  civic  corruption  and  industrial 
anarchy.  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  we  were 
alone  in  our  error:  you  yourselves  know  that 
across  narrower  seas  than  the  Atlantic  the  same 
is  true,  and  in  greater  degree,  while  even  here, 
in  these  narrow  islands  that  so  often  have  been 
the  last  refuge  and  stronghold  of  Christian 
civilization,  I  have  heard  strange  rumours  of 
those  who  would  sacrifice  Latin  and  Greek  and 
the  humanities  to  applied  science  and  voca- 
tional training ;  who  would  drive  the  very  name 
of  religion  from  the  schools ;  who  would,  in  the 
ringing  words  of  an  eminent  French  statesman, 
"put  out  the  lights  in  heaven,"  and,  to  quote 
Karl  Marx,  "destroy  the  idea  of  God  which  is 
the  keystone  of  a  perverted  civilization."  We 
have,  I  think,  rather  got  beyond  taking  this 
sort  of  thing  seriously,  and  I  doubt  if  you  ever 
will  do  so  even  for  a  moment ;  for  when  we  stop 
doing  things  long  enough  to  think,  we  all  realize 
that,  as  the  Dean  of  St.  Paul's  has  recently  said, 
"The  real  test  of  progress  is  the  kind  of  people 
that  a  country  turns  out,"  and  the  product  of 

171 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

secularized  and  intensive  education  is  not  of 
a  quality  that  develops  in  sane  and  healthy 
minds  a  sense  either  of  covetousness  or  emula- 
tion. 

So,  in  spite  of  our  backing  and  filling,  we  are, 
I  think,  in  America,  well  beyond  the  turn  of  the 
tide.  I  myself  have  seen  it  at  its  flood,  and  I 
have  seen  the  ebb  begin.  It  is  not  so  long  ago 
that  our  ideal  seemed  to  be  a  kind  of  so-called 
education  that  might  be  labelled  "made  in  Ger- 
many": we  prescribed  nothing,  and  accepted 
anything  a  freshman  in  his  wisdom  might  elect ; 
we  joined  schools  of  dental  surgery  and  "busi- 
ness science  "  (whatever  that  may  be)  and  jour- 
nalism and  farriery  to  our  august  universities; 
we  ignored  Greek  and  smiled  at  Latin ;  we  tried 
to  teach  theology  on  an  undogmatic  basis  (an 
idea  not  without  humour),  and  we  cut  out  re- 
ligious worship  altogether.  It  was  all  evanes- 
cent, however;  now  the  "free  electives"  are 
passing,  even  at  Harvard  where  they  began  and 
ran  full  riot ;  at  Princeton  the  preceptorial  sys- 
tem has  been  restored,  and  is  coming  elsewhere ; 
there,  also,  a  great  college  chapel  is  contem- 
plated, while  at  the  University  of  Chicago  one  is 

172 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

about  to  be  built  at  a  cost  of  some  three  hun- 
dred thousand  pounds.  Everywhere  residential 
quads  are  coming  into  existence:  one  ancient 
college  —  Amherst  —  is  considering  abandon- 
ing all  its  scientific  schools  and  falling  back  on 
the  sound  old  classical  basis,  while  lately  our 
own  American  Institute  of  Architects  has  en- 
dorsed the  principle  that  our  schools  of  archi- 
tecture should  grant  degrees  only  to  those  rea- 
sonably proficient  in  Latin. 

And  so  we  return  step  by  step  to  the  old  ideals 
and  sound  methods  of  English  colleges ;  return  to 
the  mother  that  bore  us,  just  as  we  return  year 
after  year  to  our  old  home  for  refreshment  and 
inspiration;  return,  even  in  a  wider  sense,  to 
those  eternally  battered  but  eternally  enduring 
principles  in  life  and  thought  and  aspiration 
which  make  up  the  great  Anglo-Saxon  heritage 
of  which  we  proudly  claim  to  be  joint  heirs  with 
yourselves.  And  in  this  return  we  find  our- 
selves recurring  once  more  to  the  very  forms  of 
the  architecture  —  or  rather,  we  hope,  to  its 
underlying  spirit  —  through  which  this  great 
tradition  has  manifested  itself.  In  our  earliest 
days  we  followed,  as  closely  as  we  could,  the 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

work  going  on  at  home ;  then  we  yielded  to  our 
new  nationality  and  wandered  off  after  strange 
gods,  —  some  of  them  very  strange,  indeed,  — 
expressing  our  experiments  in  experimental 
styles  until  the  last  shadow  of  a  memory  of 
England  seemed  wholly  gone ;  and  then,  as  the 
last  flicker  died,  behold  a  new  restoration!  for 
with  the  reaction  toward  a  broader  culture 
comes  the  return  to  the  architecture  of  Eton 
and  Winchester,  Oxford  and  Cambridge,  that 
so  fully  expressed  that  very  culture  itself. 

Consider  for  a  moment  and  you  will  see  that 
no  other  course  was  possible:  not  because  the 
fifteenth  and  sixteenth  and  early  seventeenth 
century  collegiate  architecture  of  England  is 
the  most  perfect  style  ever  devised  by  man  to 
this  particular  end.  It  is  this,  of  course,  but  the 
real  reason  for  our  return  lies  deeper,  and  it  is 
simply  that  it  is  the  only  style  that  absolutely 
expresses  our  new-old,  crescent  ideals  of  an  edu- 
cation that  makes  for  culture  and  makes  for 
character.  I  myself  have  been  coming  back  to 
Oxford  and  Cambridge  year  after  year  now  for 
a  full  generation,  others  for  even  longer  terms ; 
and  every  year  I  send,  from  my  own  and  from 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

other  offices,  boys  and  young  men,  to  the  same 
shrines  of  causes,  not  lost,  but  gone  before, 
who  are  vail  of  them  beginning  the  same  cycle  of 
periodicity  that  has  marked  the  lives  of  their 
elders ;  and  to  all  of  us,  young  and  old,  these 
gray  and  wonderful  cities  mean,  not  great  art 
alone,  but,  even  more,  the  greater  impulse  that 
incarnated  itself  in  such  personalities  as  Duns 
Scotus  and  Henry  V;  Sir  Philip  Sidney  and  Sir 
Walter  Raleigh;  Grocyn,  Linacre,  and  Eras- 
mus ;  Laud,  and  Strafford  and  Falkland ;  Hamp- 
den  and  Cromwell,  the  Duke  of  Wellington, 
John  Keble,  and  Cardinal  Newman.  For  one 
thing  we  know,  at  least,  and  that  is  that  archi- 
tecture, together  with  all  art,  is  no  matter  of 
fashion  or  predilection,  no  vain  but  desirable 
amenity  of  life,  but  rather  an  unerring  though 
perishable  record  of  civilization,  more  exact 
than  written  history,  and  the  only  perfect  show- 
ing of  the  civilization  of  a  time.  By  its  fruitage 
of  art  we  know  the  tree  of  life,  and  further  we 
know  that  this  fruit  is  not  seedless,  but  the 
guaranty  of  life  to  such  ages  as  use  it  rightly. 
We  love  it  for  what  it  is  in  itself;  more  for  what 
it  reveals  to  us  of  a  great  past ;  most  of  all,  for 

175 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

what  it  promises  our  future.  Art  has  dynamic 
potency;  it  records,  indeed,  but  it  is  evocative 
also ;  and  we  who  would  have  Sidneys  and  Straf- 
fords  and  Newmans  to  redeem  and  defend  and 
ennoble  our  civilization  use  the  architecture 
that  is  their  voicing  that  it  may  re-create  their 
spirit  in  a  later  age  and  in  a  distant  but  not 
alien  land. 

So  much,  then,  by  way  of  the  introduction 
you  did  not  bring  me  over-seas  to  say;  and  now 
let  us  turn  to  the  work  itself  of  which  you 
expect  me  to  speak. 

And  first  of  all  let  me  show  you  from  Harvard 
one  or  two  examples  of  what  we  did  for  a  begin- 
ning. It  was  n't  very  much,  I  suppose,  but  we 
care  for  it  extremely,  just  because  it  spells  our 
own  brief  antiquity,  while  it  was  honest  and 
sincere,  and  not  without  a  certain  pathetic 
element  of  far-away  longing  for  an  old  but  not 
forgotten  home.  English  it  was,  of  course,  so 
far  as  we  could  make  it,  for  we  were  all  English, 
—  or^rather  British,  —  in  bone  and  blood  and 
tradition,  down  to  half  a  century  ago.  The  old 
artistic  impulse  that  had  remained  with  man 
from  the  beginning  was  slowly  dying,  for  the 

176 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

first  time  in  recorded  history ;  it  had  been  losing 
vitality  ever  since  the  Renaissance  and  Refor- 
.mation,  but  it  was  still  instinctive,  and  so  re- 
mained until  that  Revolution,  which  included 
so  much  more  than  the  French  Terror,  came  to 
give  it  its  quietus.  This  day  —  or  night  — was 
still  far  off,  and  in  the  seventeenth  and  eigh- 
teenth centuries  there  was  still  exquisite  delicacy 
and  refinement  and  wealth  of  invention.  I  wish 
I  could  show  you  some  proofs  of  this  in  the 
shape  of  domestic  and  ecclesiastical  work  from 
Massachusetts  Bay  Colony,  and  Virginia  and 
Maryland  and  the  Carolinas,  for  it  is  true  that 
little  of  this  appears  in  our  collegiate  work. 
Here  funds  were  scant  and  dearly  obtained, 
while  the  planters  of  the  South  and  the  great 
merchants  of  the  North  were  more  lavish  in 
their  outlay ;  as  it  is,  our  early  college  buildings 
make  their  appeal  through  their  fine  propor- 
tions and  their  frank  simplicity. 

Of  course  practically  all  the  seventeenth-cen- 
tury work,  and  nine -tenths  of  that  of  the  eigh- 
teenth is  gone,  including  much  of  the  best,  and 
we  must  re-create  our  vision  of  the  past  from 
shreds  and  patches;  but  fortunately  at  Harvard 

177 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

there  remains  a  notable  group  that  has  yielded 
neither  to  vandalism  nor  conflagration.  As 
you  will  see  from  the  plan  of  the  old  "  Yard," 
the  typical  English  quadrangular  arrangement 
was  abandoned  for  a  grouping  of  isolated  build- 
ings, at  first  more  or  less  formal,  then  develop- 
ing into  final  chaos  as  other  men  with  other 
minds  came  on  the  scene  and  placed  their 
buildings,  and  designed  them  also,  at  their  own 
sweet  will.  As  for  the  material,  it  was  almost 
invariably  brick,  at  first  imported  from  the  old 
country,  for  the  visible  stone  supply  in  New 
England  was  intractible  granite,  and  even 
where  a  kinder  material  was  available,  there  was 
in  the  beginning  little  skill  in  cutting,  and  later 
little  money  to  pay  for  the  labour  involved. 
With  few  exceptions  the  trimmings  of  doors 
and  windows  and  cornices  were  of  delicately 
moulded  wood  painted  white,  the  Vignolan 
laws  as  to  proportion  being  intelligently  modi- 
fied to  fit  the  new  material,  while  the  roofs  were 
covered  with  split  shingles. 

The  first  evidence  of  decadence  appears,  I 
think,  in  the  advent  of  that  more  pompous 
style  Jefferson  did  so  much  to  advance. 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

Hitherto  what  had  been  done  was  done  simply 
and  unaffectedly;  now  came  the  conscious 
desire  for  architecture,  which  is  a  dangerous 
ambition  at  best.  At  the  University  of  Vir- 
ginia we  have  the  original  setting  out,  almost 
intact,  and  if  we  deplore  the  unnecessarily 
unreasonable  classical  porticoes,  with  columns, 
entablatures,  and  pediments  complete,  —  and 
all  built  of  deal  boards  framed  up  in  the  sem- 
blance of  a  newly  discovered  paganism,  —  we 
must  admit  the  great  dignity  of  the  plan  and 
the  singular  charm  of  the  ensemble. 

This  "Jeffersonian"  style  rapidly  took  the 
place  of  the  old  Georgian,  but  its  day  was  brief; 
and  somewhere  between  1820  and  1830  oc- 
curred that  ominous  point  when  the  last  flicker- 
ing tradition  of  good  taste  and  the  last  weak 
impulse  of  instinctive  art  vanished,  and  the 
new  era  began  wherein  the  desires  and  predil- 
ections of  society  as  a  whole  were  no  longer  for 
good  things  and  beautiful  things,  but  explicitly 
and  even  clamorously  for  bad  things  and  ugly 
things,  while  the  uncertain  offices  of  the  archi- 
tect were  the  only  agencies  that  from  time  to 
time  redeemed  the  general  chaos. 

179 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

Fortunately,  there  was  little  collegiate  build- 
ing with  us  during  this  dismal  second  quarter 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  or  rather,  and  also 
fortunately,  little  of  it  has  survived ;  and  when 
first  the  architect  appears  on  the  scene  as  the 
mentor  rather  than  the  exemplar  of  public 
opinion,  it  is  in  novel  guise,  nothing  less,  in- 
deed, than  as  the  protagonist  of  Gothic.  He 
was  not  very  Gothic,  I  must  admit,  and  in  the 
beginning  he  contented  himself  with  a  few 
apologetic  and  quite  casual  buttresses,  pointed 
arches  over  his  door  and  window  openings,  an 
octagonal  turret  or  two,  and  of  course  battle- 
ments, usually  of  two-inch  deal  neatly  painted, 
and  sometimes  sprinkled  with  sand  as  a  conces- 
sion to  appearances.  What  took  place  in  do- 
mestic and  ecclesiastical  architecture,  I  dare 
not  even  reveal  to  you,  but  the  college  work  was 
a  shade  less  horrific ;  for  sometimes,  as  at  West 
Point,  it  was  of  stone,  and  good  stone  work  will 
cover  a  multitude  of  sins  —  as  it  still  does  in 
our  own  day  and  generation,  I  believe. 

Perhaps  it  is  hardly  fair  to  attribute  this  first 
"Gothic"  to  architects;  really  it  was  the  work 
of  the  ambitious  builder  who,  after  crystallizing 

1 80 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

under  the  immortal  Batty  Langley's  handbooks 
on  classical  architecture,  suddenly  expanded 
with  almost  explosive  force  beneath  the  influ- 
ence of  that  amazing  work  of  the  same  gifted 
author  wherein  he  reduces  Gothic  also  to  a  sys- 
tem of  "orders"  and  demonstrates  how  by  a 
few  simple  rules  one  can  easily  learn  to  pro- 
duce "genteel  and  appropriate  Structures  in  the 
Gothic  Taste."  But  the  Oxford  Movement  and 
Pugin's  Gothic  Revival  soon  passed  beyond  the 
admirable  Batty  Langley,  and  the  influence  of 
Pugin  himself  entered  America,  largely  through 
a  really  great  architect,  Upjohn.  I  think  he  did 
no  collegiate  work,  but  John  Ruskin  produced 
those  that  did,  and  from  the  close  of  our  War 
between  the  States  down  to  about  1880,  the  new 
Gothic  that  expressed  his  really  enormous  influ- 
ence might  be  said  to  have  run  riot  through  our 
colleges.  There  were  those  like  Renwick  and 
Congdon,  and  Mr.  Haight  (who  is  still  living), 
that  held  conscientiously  to  the  grave  and 
archaeological  type  established  by  the  Pugins; 
there  were  others  who  tried  to  incorporate 
Ruskinian  doctrines  in  more  personal,  original, 
and  mobile  work,  as  Blomfield  and  Butterfield 

181 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

were  doing  here  in  England .  The  results  were  at 
least  lacking  in  monotony,  but  few  of  them 
achieved  the  simplicity  and  the  dignity  of  Mr. 
Haight's  work,  while  many  of  them  reached  a 
point  of  violence  and  anarchy  hardly  to  be 
matched  in  history. 

It  was  all  a  "false  dawn,"  however,  and 
ceased  almost  in  a  moment  (though  for  a  brief 
period  only,  as  we  shall  see)  when  that  great 
genius  and  greater  personality,  Richardson, 
flashed  like  an  unpredicted  comet  across  the 
sky.  The  later  seventies  were  desperate,  no 
less ;  and  the  group  of  conscientious  men  could 
not  withstand  the  flood  of  falsity  and  bad  taste 
and  artificiality  that  involved  the  whole  art  of 
architecture.  Richardson  alone  turned  the  tide, 
brushed  away  the  whole  card-house  of  artifice, 
and  deliberately  forced  a  new  and  alien  style  on 
a  bewildered  people.  He  did  great  work,  some 
of  it  immortal  work,  in  his  powerful  mode ;  but 
he  died  before  his  mission  was  accomplished, 
and  though  he  killed  the  "  French  roof  style " 
and  the  futile  Gothic,  and  all  the  other  absurdi- 
ties, he  left  behind  no  one  of  his  own  calibre  to 
carry  on  the  crusade,  but  instead  a  multitude  of 

182 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

imitators  who,  though  at  first  doing  fine  work 
under  the  memory  and  inspiration  of  their  mas- 
ter, gradually  turned  away  into  other  fields, 
leaving  the  Romanesque  propaganda  to  the 
most  inadequate  exponents  imaginable.  For  a 
decade  we  wallowed  in  lilliputian  cyclopeanism, 
and  then,  to  change  the  simile,  the  summer 
storm  swept  west  and  south,  and  over  the  deso- 
lation it  had  left  loomed,  almost  simultaneously, 
three  new  tendencies,  Colonial,  Perpendicular 
Gothic,  and  "Beaux  Arts."  Three  less  well- 
assorted  bedfellows  it  would  be  hard  to  find,  but 
with  a  magnanimity  rare  in  history  these  three 
rivals  more  or  less  succeeded  in  establishing  a 
modus  vivendi,  Colonial  taking  over  part  of  the 
new,  and  again  triply  divided,  Gaul,  in  the  shape 
of  domestic  work;  Gothic  annexing,  so  far  as  it 
could,  all  collegiate,  scholastic,  and  ecclesiasti- 
cal building;  while  to  the  Beaux  Arts  propa- 
ganda fell  all  it  could  get  of  the  rest  —  par- 
ticularly Carnegie  libraries,  town  houses,  and 
banks.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  this  partitioning  of 
architectural  activity  was  not  the  result  of 
amity,  nor  was  it  in  the  least  definitive:  the 
Colonial  style  claimed  the  patronage  of  our 

183 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

nonconformist  brethren  (with  show  of  reason 
and  propriety),  Gothic  tried  vainly  to  break 
into  the  library  fold,  while  the  Beaux  Arts 
architects  made  unavailing  eyes  at  the  Church, 
and,  indeed,  claimed  everything  in  sight.  Their 
pretensions  did  not  go  without  questioning, 
however,  for  in  the  mean  time  the  old  and  most 
classical  Classic  was  re-born  (it  had  never  wholly 
died),  and  at  the  hands  of  that  great  man, 
Charles  McKim,  it  suddenly  achieved  a  height 
of  serene  nobility  where  it  could  and  did  chal- 
lenge the  claims  of  its  rivals.  And  there  were 
other  claimants  for  the  architectural  crown  now 
so  completely  "in  commission":  there  was  the 
Spanish  pretender  with  its  doubtful  offspring, 
the  quaintly  denominated  "Mission  style"; 
there  was  the  secessionist  Americanism  of  the 
inspired  but  unguarded  Mr.  Sullivan;  there 
was  a  kind  of  neo-Byzantinism ;  there  was  a 
hidden  but  persistent  Japanese  propaganda.  In 
fact  I  was  wrong  when  I  said  that  the  architec- 
tural Gaul  was  divided  into  three  parts :  it  is  not 
such  a  triple  partition  that  confronts  us  now,  it 
is  an  omnivorous  eclecticism  that  bears  some 
of  the  ear-marks  of  anarchy.  To  use  one  of  our 

184 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

own  phrases,  "everything  goes,"  and  much  of  it 
goes  exceedingly  well,  amazingly  so,  in  fact ;  but 
the  result  is  somewhat  lacking  in  the  qualities  of 
unity  and  lucidity. 

Fortunately,  we  have  to  do  with  few  of  the 
varied  schools,  for  though  all  of  them  have  foot- 
holds in  the  several  colleges,  only  two  have 
established  their  claims,  Georgian  and  Gothic, 
and  at  the  present  time  the  latter  has  the  call 
and  has  produced  the  most  notable  results:  it 
may  almost  be  said  that,  except  where  lack 
of  funds  or  climatic  conditions  argue  against 
Gothic,  this  has  the  field  absolutely  to  itself. 
The  ascetic  and  fastidious  classicism  of  McKim 
created  Columbia  University  and  occurs  spo- 
radically  elsewhere ;  the  Boulevardesque  of  the 
Beaux  Arts  men  appears  in  a  single  building  at 
Yale,  and  in  the  slow-growing  University  of 
California  and  the  Naval  College  at  Annapolis ; 
Spanish  elements  go  to  the  making  of  Leland 
Stanford ;  and  in  Texas  my  own  firm  is  doing  "a 
deed  without  a  name  "  that  you  must  judge  for 
yourselves  and  justify  if  you  can  and  as  we  do 
ourselves.  Elsewhere  it  is,  as  I  said,  Georgian 
or  Gothic,  and  to  the  college  trustee  it  is  now 

185 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

the  question,  "under  which  King,  Bezonian." 
Harvard,  after  swinging  the  circle  of  every  pos- 
sible architectural  dogma  and  heresy,  seems  to 
have  settled  down,  as  she  should,  to  Georgian, 
as  has  Williams,  and  so  many  of  the  smaller  and 
poorer  preparatory  schools  and  colleges,  par- 
ticularly in  the  South;  but  Yale,  West  Point, 
Pennsylvania,  New  York,  Princeton,  Bryn 
Mawr,  Washington  University,  St.  Louis,  and 
Chicago,  together  with  all  the  larger  prepara- 
tory and  Church  schools,  and  the  newer  Roman 
Catholic  institutions,  are  uncompromisingly 
Gothic  of  the  type  made  immortal  in  England. 
Before  showing  you  the  nature  of  this  work, 
it  may  be  well  to  examine  a  typical  American 
university,  in  its  setting-out,  in  its  component 
parts,  and  in  its  organization.  I  will  choose  for 
this  purpose  Princeton,  of  which  I  am  a  mem- 
ber by  adoption  and  where  I  have  the  honor 
to  act  as  supervising  architect.  The  title  itself 
will  indicate  at  once  one  of  the  many  points  of 
divergence  between  the  English  and  American 
systems,  for  I  fancy  there  is  no  university  in  the 
United  Kingdom  where  one  man  is  given  almost 
complete  authority  over  all  matters  of  the 

1 86 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

choice  of  architects,  supervision  of  their  work 
both  in  design  and  execution,  acceptance  or 
rejection  of  gifts  and  their  placing  if  accepted, 
the  development  of  roads  and  paths,  and  the 
planting  of  trees  and  shrubs.  Until  recently 
such  an  office  was  unknown  in  America,  but 
since  Princeton  took  the  lead,  some  five  or  six 
years  ago,  others  have  followed  rapidly  and  the 
practice  has  now  become  an  established  cus- 
tom. 

It  was  time,  too,  that  something  should  be 
done :  as  I  have  already  indicated,  our  colleges 
were  like  Topsy  —  they  "just  growed" — 
without  rhyme  or  reason,  subject  to  the  most 
vacillating  fashion  and  the  quaint  whims  of 
emancipated  individualism,  while  the  results 
were  generally  shocking.  In  the  plan  of  Prince- 
ton you  will  easily  see  how  lawless  had  been  the 
growth,  and  conditions  were  even  worse  at  Har- 
vard and  Yale.  You  will  note  at  once  from  the 
wide  spacing  and  the  lack  of  coordination  an- 
other point  of  difference :  with  us  almost  every 
college  has  begun  in  open  country,  as  an  original 
foundation.  We  have  nothing  like  Oxford  and 
Cambridge,  partly  because  of  this  fact,  and 

187 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

partly  because  each  college  is  with  us  a  unit ;  we 
have  no  gathering  up  of  many  and  independent 
foundations,  loosely  knit  together  for  admin- 
istrative purposes:  we  have  instead  self-con- 
tained units,  sometimes  of  enormous  size,  and 
each  new  benefactor  founds,  not  a  new  college, 
but  a  dormitory,  a  library,  a  school  of  law  or 
medicine  or  forestry  or  —  journalism.  Person- 
ally, I  think  this  plan  must  be  abandoned,  and 
a  breaking-up  into  more  manageable  units  take 
place.  It  seems  to  me  demonstrable  that  in 
schools  that  have  from  four  to  six  thousand  stu- 
dents half  the  character-building  qualities  of 
education  are  lost,  and  that  the  personal  ele- 
ment must  be  regained  by  breaking  up  these 
unwieldy  masses  into  working  units  of  not 
more  than  two  hundred  men  each,  at  least  for 
living  and  social  purposes.  This  was  attempted 
two  years  ago  at  Princeton,  but  the  time  was 
not  ripe  and  the  reform  failed ;  still  the  leaven 
is  working  at  Harvard  and  Cornell  and  else- 
where, and  is,  I  think,  within  measurable  dis- 
tance of  accomplishment. 

In  the  new  plan  of  Princeton,  which  shows 
the  university  as  it  now  is,  and  indicates  its  fu- 

188 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

ture  lines  of  development,  you  will  see  at  once 
how  strong  the  tendency  is  toward  the  standard 
type:  here  the  dormitories  are  assuming  quad- 
rangular form,  and  in  time  may  become  full 
residential  colleges,  each  with  its  common  room 
and  great  hall  and,  when  times  have  still  further 
changed,  perhaps  its  chapel.  In  the  beginning 
our  dormitories  were  simply  barracks,  with  liv- 
ing rooms  opening  off  long  halls,  with  startling 
results  so  far  as  order  and  discipline  were  con- 
cerned. Now  the  "entry"  type  is  almost  uni- 
versal, the  type  that  holds  in  England,  while 
the  old  sequence  of  regular  cells  serving  both  as 
study  and  bedroom  for  one  or  even  two  men, 
with  a  common  necessarium  two  or  three  hun- 
dred yards  away,  has  given  place  to  the  stand- 
ard type  of  suites  consisting  of  a  study  and  two 
bedrooms  for  two  undergraduates,  and  a  study 
and  bedroom  for  each  graduate  student.  In 
the  former  case  each  stairway  is  separated  from 
the  next  by  a  party  wall,  unbroken  except  in  the 
basement  to  which  all  staircases  descend,  and 
here  a  general  corridor  gives  access  to  groups  of 
baths  and  toilets,  and  to  the  box-rooms,  and  to 
the  other  staircases  in  the  quadrangle  as  well. 

189 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

In  the  newest  of  our  buildings  for  graduate  stu- 
dents every  two  suites  have  a  private  bath 
between.  Of  course,  we  pride  ourselves  very 
much  on  our  plumbing,  and  I  sometimes 
wonder  if  we  are  not  becoming  almost  Roman 
in  our  luxuries  for  bathing:  it  is  possible  we 
have  gone  too  far,  and  that  in  time  we  shall 
return  to  more  Spartan  arrangements;  but  at 
present  there  is  no  denying  the  fact  that  we 
give  nine  tenths  of  our  students  more  than 
they  are  accustomed  to  at  home. 

Another  thing  that  will  strike  you  is  the  mag- 
nificence of  our  gymnasiums  and  the  dominat- 
ing quality  of  our  schools  of  science.  There  is 
really  a  rivalry  amongst  our  colleges  as  to  which 
shall  have  the  biggest  and  most  perfectly 
equipped  gymnasium  and  swimming-pool,  but 
this  is  partly  excused  by  the  fact  that  our 
winters  are  so  severe  that  for  three  or  four 
months  skating,  snow-shoeing,  and  ice-boating 
are  about  the  only  possible  forms  of  out-of-door 
exercise  in  the  North.  Then  we  have  general 
physical  directors,  as  well  as  special  trainers  for 
the  varied  forms  of  athletics,  and  in  many  col- 
leges regular  and  searching  examinations  of  the 

190 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

men  for  physical  and  functional  weaknesses, 
and  as  a  result  the  health  of  our  schools  is  well 
above  normal.  As  for  our  science  buildings,  you 
know,  as  we  know  only  too  well,  how  almost 
unbalanced  we  have  become  in  our  devotion  to 
practical  and  "vocational"  training,  and  how 
obsessed  we  have  become  with  the  mania  for 
natural  science.  Here  at  Princeton  there  is  less 
of  this  than  elsewhere,  but  two  of  our  newest 
and  most  magnificent  buildings  are  devoted, 
the  one  to  biology,  the  other  to  physics,  though 
as  yet  we  have  no  schools  of  mechanical  and 
electrical  and  mining  engineering,  as  happens  so 
often  elsewhere. 

One  novelty  you  will  not  notice  on  the 
Princeton  plan,  and  that  is  the  clubs  and  fra- 
ternities. We  have  as  many  "Greek-Letter  So- 
cieties" (which  are  very  awful  and  very  secret 
organizations)  as  we  have  colleges,  and  there 
are  some  institutions  in  America  where  these 
fraternity  houses  almost  outnumber  the  aca- 
demic buildings  themselves.  At  Princeton  no 
Greek-letter  societies  are  allowed,  but  there  are 
two  old  secret  organizations,  the  Whig  and  the 
Clio,  whose  white  marble  mausoleums  form  the 

191 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

very  centre  of  the  campus,  while  to  the  east 
stretches  a  great  street  absolutely  lined  with  the 
private  clubs  which  grew  up  when  the  fratern- 
ities were  taboo.  These  clubs  take  in  only  a  cer- 
tain number  of  new  members  each  year ;  they 
are  distinctly  aristocratic  in  their  tone,  though 
aristocratic  of  a  sound  and  healthy  type ;  and 
the  buildings  generally  follow  the  lines  of  an  old 
and  palatial  country  house. 

From  all  these  points  of  difference  you  will 
see,  then,  that  our  American  university  is  a  very 
different  matter,  in  its  architectural  form,  from 
those  in  this  country.  Our  newest  graduate  col- 
leges come  nearer,  as  you  will  see  when  I  show 
you  the  now  rising  buildings  for  Princeton  which 
lie  half  a  mile  to  the  west. 

In  the  mean  time  let  us  examine  the  begin- 
nings of  what  has  been  a  notable  Gothic  renais- 
sance amongst  our  colleges,  and  we  need  not 
forsake  Princeton  to  do  this,  for  it  was  here,  in 
the  shape  of  the  new  library,  that  it  came  into 
being.  Alexander  Hall  had  just  been  completed 
in  the  verbose  and  turgid  style  that  followed 
the  memory  of  Richardson  like  a  Nemesis,  and 
its  architect  was  given  orders  to  abandon  this 

192 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

and  revert  to  what  we  sometimes  call  "Ox- 
ford Gothic."  It  was  not  a  style  with  which 
he  had  either  sympathy  or  familiarity,  and  he 
produced  a  work  which,  while  acceptable  in 
its  mass  and  general  composition,  fails  sadly 
through  its  coarse  scale  and  its  mechanical 
ornamentation.  Almost  simultaneously,  how- 
ever, certain  new  dormitories  were  put  in  hand 
—  Blair  and  Little  Halls ;  and  here  the  archi- 
tects were  two  young  men  of  Philadelphia  who 
most  unaccountably  could  think  and  feel  in 
Gothic  terms.  I  like  to  record  their  names 
whenever  I  can,  —  John  Stewardson  and  Wal- 
ter Cope,  —  for  in  addition  to  being  singularly 
lovable  fellows,  they  were  geniuses  of  no  infer- 
ior order;  they  brought  into  being,  at  Princeton, 
Bryn  Mawr,  and  the  University  of  Pennsyl- 
vania, structures  that  are  to  me  singularly  beau- 
tiful and  inspiring,  and  they  left  their  mark  for 
all  time  on  American  architecture.  Both  are 
dead,  and  at  a  pathetically  early  age,  while  the 
profession  of  architecture  is  the  poorer  thereby. 
About  the  same  time  a  transplanted  English- 
man, Mr.  Vaughan,  sometime  pupil  of  that 
immortal  master  of  the  new  Gothic,  the  late 

193 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

George  Bodley,  and  still  with  us  I  am  glad  to 
say,  began  the  introduction  of  the  same  style 
into  our  great  preparatory  schools,  which  you 
here  would  call  "public  schools."  His  work  at 
St.  Paul's  marked  a  new  era  in  this  category 
of  scholastic  architecture,  and  was  continued 
later  in  more  sumptuous  fashion  at  Groton. 
My  own  firm  has  been  following  his  leadership 
in  the  convent  school  of  St.  Mary  at  Peekskill, 
and  theTaft  School  in  Connecticut,  while  there 
are  innumerable  examples  of  the  same  sort  of 
thing  all  over  the  country. 

It  was  really  Cope  and  Stewardson's  work 
at  Princeton  that  set  the  pace,  however,  and 
so  beautiful  was  it,  so  convincing  as  to  the 
possibilities  of  adapting  this  perfect  style  to 
all  modern  scholastic  requirements,  that  the 
Princeton  authorities,  with  a  wisdom  beyond 
their  generation,  passed  a  law  that  for  the 
future  every  building  erected  there  should  fol- 
low the  same  general  style.  "Seventy-nine" 
Hall,  Patton,  McCosh,  and  the  Gymnasium 
followed  in  quick  succession;  then  came  the 
great  Palmer  Physical  Laboratory,  the  Biolog- 
ical Laboratory  —  Guyot  Hall  —  Upper  Pyne 

194 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

and  Lower  Pyne,  and  a  little  later,  after  I  had 
become  supervising  architect,  Campbell  Hall, 
by  my  own  firm,  and  the  altogether  wonderful 
quadrangles  of  Holder  and  Hamilton  Halls,  by 
Messrs.  Day  Brothers  and  Klauder,  of  Phila- 
delphia. These  latter  buildings  mark  one  of  the 
very  high  points  we  have  achieved  in  Collegiate 
Gothic  in  modern  times.  When  the  great  quads 
are  completed,  we  shall,  I  think,  confront  a 
masterpiece. 

The  most  recent  Princeton  work  is  the  great 
Graduate  College  my  own  firm  is  now  building 
on  the  crest  of  a  low  hill,  half  a  mile  from  the 
college  campus,  and  commanding  a  gently  slop- 
ing lawn  of  about  eighty  acres.  This  new  col- 
lege is,  of  course,  only  for  graduate  students; 
it  has  an  endowment  of  over  half  a  million 
pounds;  it  is  conceived  and  organized  on  the 
most  liberal,  cultural,  and  scholastic  lines,  far 
away,  indeed,  from  the  popular  schemes  of  "vo- 
cational" training;  and  it  should  go  far  toward 
restoring  the  balance  in  favour  of  sound  learning 
and  noble  scholarship.  The  plan  shows  only 
the  work  now  in  hand,  the  first  quad,  with  the 
great  hall  and  its  kitchens,  together  with  the 

195 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

Cleveland  Tower,  which  is  a  national  memorial 
to  one  of  our  greatest  Presidents,  who  spent  his 
years,  after  retiring  from  office,  in  Princeton,  as 
a  trustee  of  the  university  and  a  devoted  friend 
of  the  new  Graduate  College  on  the  lines  that 
had  been  determined  by  its  Dean,  Dr.  West. 
At  present  the  placing  of  the  great  tower  seems 
a  little  too  like  that  of  the  Victoria  Tower  at 
Westminster  to  be  wholly  satisfactory,  but  in 
some  distant  future  a  second  quadrangle  will  be 
constructed  to  the  south  and  east,  containing 
the  Chapel,  the  Library,  and  quarters  for  Fel- 
lows, which  will  restore  the  tower  itself  to  the 
centre  of  the  composition.  Some  day,  also,  a 
third  quad  will  be  developed  to  the  northeast, 
and  then  the  group  will  be  complete,  for  the 
Dean's  lodgings,  with  their  private  gardens,  to 
the  southwest  of  the  great  hall,  are  already 
under  construction. 

Let  us  now  turn  from  Princeton  to  some 
others  of  our  many  colleges ;  but  before  we  take 
up  the  Gothic  tale,  let  us  see  what  has  been 
done  in  other  stylistic  directions,  for  I  would 
not  give  you  the  idea  that  the  restoration  of 
what  one  of  your  own  great  Gothicists,  Mr. 
196 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

Champneys,  has  called  so  well  the  "Oxford 
Mixture,"  is  all  plain  sailing,  or  that  splendid 
work  has  not  been  done  in  other  directions. 
Columbia  University  in  New  York  —  the  old 
King's  College  of  Colonial  days  —  stands,  of 
course,  as  the  noblest  type  of  the  pure  Classi- 
cal idea,  and  its  majestical  library  will  always 
remain  a  national  monument.  Unfortunately, 
the  site  is  crowded  and  fatally  restricted:  the 
mistake  was  made  of  fixing  this  —  when  the 
change  was  necessary  a  generation  ago  —  too 
near  the  outposts  of  the  advancing  city,  which 
like  a  conquering  army  has  already  swept  up  to 
its  gates  and  miles  beyond.  For  myself  I  can't 
imagine  a  great  centre  of  higher  education  in 
the  howl  and  war  of  a  great  city,  or  anywhere, 
in  fact,  except  in  the  quiet  country  or  in  the  vil- 
lage environment  it  has  built  for  itself,  and  I 
fancy  another  generation  will  see  another  mov- 
ing on  of  Columbia ;  .and  when  this  happens  I 
venture  to  predict  that,  in  spite  of  the  grave  and 
scholarly  mastery  of  McKim,  Mead,  and  White's 
work,  the  new  housing  will  be  on  the  lines  that 
Oxford  and  Cambridge  have  not  only  made 
their  own,  but  universal  and  eternal. 

197 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

There  is  little  else  that  is  purely  Classical 
amongst  our  universities,  though  Carrere  and 
Hastings  have  built  a  most  engagingly  Parisian 
Alumni  Hall  at  Yale,  the  Naval  Academy  at 
Annapolis  is  strictly  French,  and  the  University 
of  California  is  growing  on  scrupulously  ficole 
des  Beaux  Arts  lines,  afar  on  the  Pacific  Coast. 
Georgian,  however,  has  established  itself  as  a 
determined  rival  of  the  "Oxford  Mixture,"  and 
some  of  its  products  are  not  only  logical  and 
lovely,  but  genuinely  scholastic  as  well.  Har- 
vard, as  I  have  said,  is  beginning  to  follow 
this  line,  and  so  is  Williams,  where  we  ourselves 
are  trying  to  show  we  have  no  hard  feelings, 
by  building  a  Commencement  Hall,  and  a  new 
quadrangle,  in  this  quite  characteristically 
American  style.  In  Virginia,  also,  we  are  slowly 
constructing  a  great  college  for  women,  while 
we  are  using  the  same  style  for  another  of 
our  oldest  and  most  famous  "preparatory 
schools"  at  Exeter,  as  well  as  at  yet  another 
girls'  college,  Wheaton,  in  Massachusetts. 
Georgian  also,  with  rather  quaint  Roman  ele- 
ments, has  been  used  by  McKim,  Mead,  and 
White  for  the  vast  War  College  at  Washing- 

198 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

ton,  and  altogether  it  is,  as  we  say  in  our 
colloquial  way,  giving  Gothic  "a  run  for  its 
money." 

The  University  of  Pennyslvania  shows  still 
more  of  Cope  and  Stewardson's  wonderful 
work,  though  here  it  is  couched  in  an  extremely 
rich  Elizabethan  vernacular; and  I  am  sure  you 
will  admit  that  the  style  is  handled  in  a  magnifi- 
cent and  competent  fashion.  Here  it  is  all  red 
brick  and  yellow  stone,  and  the  same  materials 
are  used  in  Mr.  Day's  beautifully  proportioned 
and  very  reserved  Gymnasium.  Bryn  Mawr 
again  is  built  of  the  wonderful  stone  that  un- 
derlies all  Pennsylvania  and  New  Jersey,  putting 
a  premium  on  good  architecture.  Here  in  Eng- 
land all  building  stone  is  finely  dressed,  but  in 
America  we  have  adopted  the  practice  of  using 
"ledge  stone"  for  our  ashlar,  our  trimmings 
only  being  tooled.  Fortunately,  we  have  a  wide 
variety  of  singularly  beautiful  stones,  ranging 
in  colour  through  all  shades  of  gray,  brown,  pur- 
ple, and  tawny,  easily  obtained,  inexpensive 
and  durable.  In  a  way  I  think  we  gain  a  rich- 
ness in  colour  and  texture  that  is  obtainable  in  no 
other  way,  while  we  also  acquire  something  of 

199 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

that  effect  of  age,  which  is,  after  all,  so  essential 
a  part  of  architecture. 

Washington  University,  St.  Louis,  is  later 
work  of  this  same  firm  of  Cope  and  Steward- 
son,  after  the  latter  had  died,  and  good  as  it  is, 
it  shows  the  loss  of  the  peculiar  poetry  that 
marked  everything  Stewardson  touched.  The 
plan  is  exceedingly  interesting  and  very  mas- 
terly, you  will  admit.  It  was  laid  out  de  novo, 
and  after  our  college  authorities  had  experi- 
enced a  change  of  heart.  With  Chicago  Univer- 
sity we  come  to  another  of  those  institutions 
where  the  reverse  course  was  followed :  here  the 
first  buildings  were  distributed  without  any 
regard  to  architectural  effect,  and  Shepley, 
Rutan  and  Coolidge,  in  taking  over  the  work, 
have  been  badly  handicapped.  This  is  the  most 
archaeological  of  the  "College  Gothic"  in  Amer- 
ica, accurate,  conservative,  and  reserved.  For 
contrast  consider  Mr.  Post's  "College  of  the 
City  of  New  York,"  which  is  as  poetical,  fantas- 
tic, and  imaginative  as  the  other  is  austere  and 
cautious.  I  am  afraid  I  think  that  here  is  an 
example  of  carrying  a  good  thing  too  far  in  the 
use  of  one  stone  for  ashlar  and  another  for 

200 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

trimmings.  Here  the  ashlar  is  almost  black  (the 
trap-rock  that  forms  a  great  dyke  along  the 
geological  "fault"  that  forms  the  Hudson 
River),  while  the  trimming  stones  are  not  stone 
at  all,  but  a  pure  white  terra-cotta  with  a  sur- 
face like  ivory.  In  itself  the  design  is  so  striking, 
so  forceful,  so  full  of  life  and  spirit,  one  rather 
wishes  it  might  have  been  expressed  in  mate- 
rials of  greater  coherency. 

Fortunately,  both  for  education  and  architec- 
ture, practically  all  our  collegiate  work  is  fixed 
in  the  country,  where  there  is  land  enough  and 
we  are  able  to  keep  down  to  those  modest  walls 
and  few  ranges  of  windows  that  are  so  essentially 
a  part  of  the  models  we  now  follow :  at  Prince- 
ton, for  instance,  the  residential  buildings  are 
seldom  more  than  two  stories  in  height,  even 
when  perhaps  three  would  be  better ;  but  we  are 
very  afraid,  and  justly,  of  the  aspiring  tenden- 
cies, in  our  light-footed  land,  that  lead  to  the 
building  of  Towers  of  Babel,  sometimes,  I  re- 
gret to  say,  Gothic  in  style  —  or  rather  with 
passably  acceptable  Gothic  detail.  In  one  in- 
stance, however,  that  of  the  Union  Theologi- 
cal Seminary  (a  Presbyterian  institution),  in 
201 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

New  York,  strange  counsels  prevailed  as  to 
site  and  this  was  chosen  well  within  the  city, 
and  where  land  already  possessed  an  altogether 
artificial  value.  As  a  result  the  architects, 
Messrs.  Allen  and  Collens,  were  confronted 
with  the  very  grievous  necessity  of  piling  up 
their  levels  into  a  total  with  which,  I  think, 
Gothic,  either  in  spirit  or  in  method,  has  little 
sympathy.  They  have  a  fine  chapel,  however, 
and  when  the  enormous  corner  tower  is  built, 
it  will  probably  do  much  toward  reducing  the 
other  buildings  to  a  more  reasonable  frame  of 
mind. 

At  the  beginnings  of  another  theological 
seminary,  Roman  Catholic  this  time,  Messrs. 
Maginnis  and  Walsh  have  already  completed 
one  building,  the  tower  of  which  is,  I  think, 
very  beautiful.  The  general  plan  is  not  yet 
wholly  determined,  but  it  includes  a  huge  parish 
church  and  will  give  a  great  opportunity  for  the 
architects  to  strike  another  blow  for  Roman 
Catholic  Emancipation.  I  should  shrink  from 
trying  to  give  you  any  faintest  idea  of  the  career 
of  architectural  crime  that  has  been  led  by  the 
Roman  Church  in  America  until  now  —  and 

202 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

the  stars  of  promise  are  even  yet  dim  and 
widely  scattered.  It  has  been  a  carnival  of  hor- 
ror unbroken  by  any  ray  of  light  —  except, 
perhaps,  St.  Patrick's  Cathedral  and  the  Paul- 
ist  Church  in  New  York ;  but  it  is  much  that 
so  good  a  thing  as  Boston  College  should  come 
into  existence,  and  it  may  serve  as  a  leaven 
until  we  Anglicans  in  America,  as  you  here  in 
England,  may  have  to  look  alive  to  prevent 
Rome  outdoing  us  at  our  own  game,  which  has 
always  been  good  architecture  and  plenty  of  it. 
Near  this  Roman  college,  another  great  insti- 
tution is  rising,  not  strictly  collegiate,  though 
certainly  educational,  the  "  Perkins  Institution 
for  the  Blind,"  where  Mr.  R.  C.  Sturgis  is 
developing  a  singularly  personal  and  intimate 
piece  of  semi-domestic  Gothic.  In  fact,  as  I  said 
at  the  beginning,  good  Gothic  is  encroaching 
steadily  on  the  preserves  of  Classicist,  Boule- 
vardier,  and  Colonial,  and  this  in  spite  of  the 
fact  that,  with  the  single  exception  of  Harvard, 
every  one  of  our  schools  of  architecture  abso- 
lutely disregards  every  type  and  phase  of 
Gothic,  both  in  design  and  in  theory.  Of  course, 
it  can't  quite  be  suppressed  in  history  and  ar- 

203 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

chaeology,  but  it  is  treated  rather  as  the  madcap 
escapade  of  a  callow  youth,  and  passed  over  as 
lightly  as  possible.  In  spite  of  this,  architects 
do  appear  who  love  Gothic,  and,  what  is  more, 
know  about  it  also.  Religion  clamours  for  it, 
education  annexes  it,  and  even,  in  one  instance, 
the  Government  of  the  United  States  itself 
accepted  it  with  alacrity,  and  has  found  it  not 
half  so  bad  as  it  looked.  For  an  end,  therefore, 
of  this  casual  showing,  I  want  to  place  before 
you  some  views  of  the  United  States  Military 
Academy  at  West  Point,  of  which,  as  a  military 
training-school,  we  are  so  inordinately  and  so 
justly  proud.  I  cannot  begin  to  give  you  any 
idea  of  the  extravagant  beauty  of  the  site  of 
West  Point:  it  is  like  the  loveliest  part  of  the 
Rhine,  only  bolder  and  more  dramatic.  Moun- 
tains rise  from  the  river  on  either  hand,  deeply 
forested,  Storm-King  and  Dunderberg  lifting 
highest  of  all;  and  on  a  narrow  plateau,  one 
hundred  and  fifty  feet  above  the  river,  stands 
the  Academy,  its  buildings  forming  a  rampart 
along  the  cliff  and  creeping  up  the  mountain- 
sides all  around.  Of  course  there  was  n't  any- 
thing one  could  do  there  except  Gothic,  —  of 

204 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

sorts,  —  though  others  had  thought  differently, 
as  one  who  built  there  a  lovely  pagan  fane  like 
a  dream  of  Imperial  Rome.  Moreover,  most  of 
the  old  work  was  pseudo-Gothic,  and  it  had 
made  a  tradition,  —  everything  does  this  at 
West  Point,  I  am  glad  to  say,  —  so  it  was  not 
startling  after  all  that  our  Classical  Govern- 
ment should  have  endorsed  a  Gothic  school. 

I  am  not  sure  they  got  it:  I  think  the  chapel 
on  its  crag,  dominating  the  whole  group,  would 
pass,  though  it  surely  is  not  archaeological ;  the 
site  is  compelling,  however,  and  really  what  we 
tried  to  do  was  to  translate  the  rocks  and  trees 
and  ribbed  cliffs  into  architectural  form.  In  the 
interior  there  is  perhaps  something  more  of  the 
scholastic  quality:  in  any  case  it  is  all  honest 
masonry  throughout,  —  floor,  walls,  and  vault, 
—  and  it  ought  to  stand  for  all  time.  Just  what 
the  cavalry  and  artillery  buildings  may  be,  I 
don't  know,  nor  does  it  much  matter:  they  are 
an  attempt  to  express  outwardly  their  function 
and  in  the  simplest  terms ;  the  stables  sweep  in 
an  enormous  arc  around  one  side  of  the  cavalry 
plain,  and  at  the  back,  against  the  towering 
hills,  are  the  barracks,  one  for  each  branch  of 

205 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

the  service.  The  riding  hall  is  no  more,  archi- 
tecturally, than  a  rampart  of  rock,  heavily  but- 
tressed, and  six  hundred  feet  in  length,  a  di- 
mension that  is  prolonged  to  the  south  by  the 
tower,  and  the  power-house  that  breaks  down 
step  by  step,  along  the  coal-conveyor,  to  the 
water  level  and  the  railway  tunnel.  The  cadet 
barracks  are  the  result  of  an  amour  (perhaps 
illicit)  between  ironclad  military  regulations 
and  a  very  free  and  easy  Gothic,  but  their  inter- 
minable ranges  of  windows  and  buttresses  show 
not  unpicturesquely  through  the  great  trees 
that  border  the  Infantry  Plain.  The  gymna- 
sium is  something  freer  still,  but  not  unpleasing 
in  its  colour,  of  tawny  brick  of  a  kind  of  velvet 
texture,  and  creamy  stone  trimmings.  Unfortu- 
nately some  of  the  most  important  work  is  not 
yet  begun.  There  are  scores  of  semi-detached 
quarters  for  married  officers,  from  many  of 
which  the  views  are  such  as  one  crosses  con- 
tinents to  see ;  but  the  new  academic  building 
is  not  yet  finished,  while  no  funds  have  been 
made  available  for  the  vast  quadrangles  of  the 
quartermaster's  department,  the  cadet  head- 
quarters which  will,  from  the  plain,  form  the 
206 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

structural  base  for  the  chapel  (though  this  will 
be  well  behind  and  above),  the  hotel,  and  — 
most  needed  of  all  —  the  staff  headquarters. 
This  latter  group  will  terminate  the  main  axis, 
which  will  stretch  a  full  half-mile  from  the  land- 
ing on  the  upper  level  at  the  elevator  tower  and 
below  the  hotel,  past  the  infirmary,  between  the 
old  and  the  new  academic  buildings  connected 
by  their  vast  triumphal  arch  with  its  niched 
statues,  past  the  enormous  post  headquarters, 
and  so  across  the  middle  of  the  Infantry 
Plain.  The  group  will  be  made  up  of  residen- 
tial quarters  for  the  superintendent,  comman- 
dant of  cadets,  quartermaster,  adjutant,  and 
surgeon,  all  grouped  around  an  open  court 
that  contains  the  state  apartments  of  the  Presi- 
dent, the  secretary  of  war,  and  distinguished 
guests.  There  will  be  a  great  tower  pierced 
by  an  arched  sally-port,  a  banqueting-room 
vaulted  and  walled  in  stone,  state  reception- 
rooms,  and  all  the  other  accommodations  neces- 
sary at  a  place  that  appeals  with  singular  force 
to  all  the  people  of  the  Republic,  from  its  Chief 
Magistrate  down  to  the  humblest  taxpayer. 
Lacking  these  buildings,  West  Point  is,  of 
207 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

course,  quite  incomplete,  but  it  is  worth  seeing 
even  now,  and  for  my  own  part  I  think,  of  the 
finished  buildings,  the  post  headquarters  is  not 
the  least  interesting.  It  is  built  on  the  edge  of 
the  cliff,  and  the  entrance  by  the  base  gate  is 
four  stories  below  the  main  court,  which  is 
entered  from  the  upper  level.  It  is  a  pretty  big 
building,  but  it  is  wholly  occupied  by  the  ad- 
ministration of  the  Academy  and  the  military 
museum,  and  I  want  particularly  to  say  that, 
massive  as  it  is,  it  is  all  real  masonry:  it  is  no 
steel-frame  skeleton  clothed  indifferently  with 
a  veneering  of  masonry;  it  is  all  of  stone  dug 
from  the  reservation  cliffs  and  shot  down  to 
these  lower  levels. 

And  the  same  is  true  not  only  of  the  rest  of 
the  buildings  at  West  Point,  but  of  practically 
all  the  other  work  I  have  shown  you  as  well. 
We  do,  indeed,  indulge  in  skeleton  construction 
and  reinforced  concrete  and  other  structural 
expedients  and  substitutes,  but  deep  in  our 
racial  consciousness,  as  in  that  of  all  other 
Anglo-Saxon  peoples,  is  the  solid  conviction 
that,  after  all,  there  are  but  three  real  things 
in  the  world,  —  the  home,  the  school,  and  the 
208 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

Church,  —  and  that  when  we  are  dealing  with 
eternal  verities  honest  and  enduring  construc- 
tion is  alone  admissible.  And  it  is  to  the  same 
consciousness,  I  think,  that  we  may  attribute 
the  very  universal  return  to  Gothic  of  some 
form  for  our  churches  and  our  colleges  and  our 
schools.  After  all,  there  have  never  been  but 
three  real  styles  of  architecture  in  the  West, 
noble  in  impulse,  organic  in  structure,  perfect 
in  detail ;  and  these  three  are  Greek,  Byzantine, 
and  Gothic :  everything  else  is  either  a  patois  or 
a  form  of  slang.  Greek  and  Byzantine  are  in  es- 
sence alien  to  our  blood  and  temper,  and  Gothic 
alone  remains.  Over-seas,  flushed  with  a  new 
and  half-unconscious  recognition  of  the  revolu- 
tion that  is  slowly  lifting  the  world  out  of  ma- 
terialism to  the  high  free  levels  of  a  new  ideal- 
ism and  spirituality,  we  instinctively  revert  to 
the  very  style  which  came  into  being  to  voice 
the  old  idealism  and  the  old  spirituality  of  the 
great  Christian  Middle  Ages.  Thus  far  we  have, 
perhaps,  done  little  more  than  reproduce;  re- 
cording our  reverence  for  the  great  works  of 
our  common  ancestors,  in  buildings  that  hold 
closely  to  type.  We  have  not  hammered  out 
209 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

our  own  intimate  style,  or  national  and  con- 
temporary architecture,  any  more  than  have 
any  other  modern  races  and  peoples ;  but  this 
will  come  by  and  by.  At  present  we  architects 
are,  I  conceive,  no  longer  as  in  the  past  the 
mouthpiece  of  a  people,  creating  the  visible 
form  for  a  great  dominating  social  impulse  that 
is  the  mark  of  supreme  civilization :  rather  are 
we  the  voices  crying  in  the  wilderness,  the 
pioneers  of  the  vanguard  of  the  new  life,  the 
men  who  re-create  from  antiquity  the  beauty 
that  is  primarily  educational,  that  so  it  may 
work  subtly  through  the  consciousness  of  those 
who  come  under  its  influence,  slowly  building 
up  a  new  civilization  that,  when  it  has  come 
full  tide,  will  burst  the  shell  of  archaeological 
forms  and  come  forth  in  its  new  and  significant 
and  splendid  shape. 

We  have  not  now,  nor  have  had  for  three 
centuries,  a  civilization  that  demanded  or  could 
create  such  artistic  expression ;  but  the  light  is 
already  on  the  edges  of  the  high  hills,  and  we 
know  that  a  new  dawn  is  at  hand.  In  the 
mean  time,  like  the  monks  in  the  dim  monas- 
teries of  the  Dark  Ages,  we  cherish  and  con- 
210 


UNIVERSITY  ARCHITECTURE 

serve  all  that  was  great  in  our  greatest  past, 
building  as  well  as  we  may  new  Oxfords  and 
new  Westminster  Abbeys,  new  Lincolns,  new 
Richmond  Castles,  new  Haddon  Halls,  not  for 
a  last  new  word  in  architectural  expression,  but 
as  schoolmasters  and  as  prophets,  content  with 
the  educational  work  we  are  accomplishing, 
leaving  to  our  successors  the  equal  but  not 
more  honourable  task  of  voicing  in  novel  and 
adequate  form  the  new  civilization  we  are  help- 
ing to  create. 


VII 

THE    MINISTRY    OF    ART 


VII 

THE    MINISTRY   OF    ART1 

\  RCHITECTURE,  even  in  a  title,  can 
•**•  hardly  be  disassociated  from  the  other 
component  parts  of  that  wonderful  gift  of  God 
that,  in  our  indifferent  use  of  words,  we  denom- 
inate "art."  In  each  one  of  them,  whether  it 
be  sculpture,  painting,  or  architecture,  poetry, 
music,  the  drama,  or  ceremonial,  there  is,  of 
course,  one  peculiar  mode  whereby  it  manifests 
itself,  the  instrument  of  its  operation ;  but  each 
of  these  is  but  a  dialect  of  a  normal  language ; 
together  they  are  the  Pentecostal  tongues 
through  which  the  Holy  Spirit  manifests  Him- 
self in  a  peculiar  way  to  all  nations  and  kindreds 
and  peoples.  Art  is  not  only  a  function  of  the 
soul,  an  inalienable  heritage  of  man,  an  attri- 
bute of  all  godly  and  righteous  society;  it  is 
also  the  language  of  all  spiritual  ventures  and 
experiences,  while,  more  potently  than  any 
other  of  the  works  of  man,  it  proclaims  the 

1  Read  before  the  American  Church  Congress,  Troy,  N.Y. 
215 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

glory  of  God,  revealing  in  symbolical  form  some 
measure  of  that  absolute  truth  and  that  abso- 
lute beauty  that  are  His  being. 

Through  all  the  varied  qualities  of  this  seven- 
fold mystery  of  art  runs  one  unchanging  and 
unchangeable  principle,  and  the  nature  of  this 
principle  we  must  define  before  we  consider  the 
particularities  of  one  art  alone  and  the  scope 
and  potency  of  its  service. 

In  this  necessity  there  is,  let  us  admit,  some- 
thing unnatural.  Never  in  the  past  has  there 
been  a  great  art  that  was  clearly  conscious  of 
its  nature:  none  that  by  taking  thought  has 
added  one  cubit  to  its  stature.  Art  that  is  self- 
conscious  halts  on  the  perilous  rim  of  artifice. 
The  intensive  activities  of  art  analysis  and  art 
education  have  brought  into  being  never  an  art 
and  never  an  artist  of  the  measure  of  the  artist 
and  the  art  of  a  past  so  absorbed  in  spiritual 
adventures  and  material  accomplishments  that 
it  lacked  the  time  for  self-analysis.  And  yet,  so 
novel  is  the  basis  of  our  contemporary  life,  so 
severed  from  the  spiritual  succession  of  history, 
so  bound  by  the  chains  of  analysis  to  the  rock  of 
definition,  we  are  compelled  by  circumstance  to 

216 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

analyze  and  define  as  never  before ;  nor  can  we 
keep  our  curious  hands  from  the  Pandora's  box 
of  very  mystery  itself,  forgetting  that  the  lifted 
lid  means,  not  the  clear  revealing  of  strange  and 
hidden  wonders,  but  their  instant  and  implaca- 
ble flight. 

The  curious  inquiries  of  Calvin  wrought 
hopeless  havoc  with  the  heavenly  vision  of  St. 
Augustine ;  the  insolent  brutalities  of  eugenics 
are  the  Nemesis  of  wholesome  humanity;  the 
picking  and  stealing  fingers  of  the  Renaissance 
broke  the  Psyche  wings  of  art ;  and  yet,  in  defi- 
ance of  precedent,  we  essay  again  the  excuseless 
and  the  impossible.  What  do  we  mean  by  "art," 
the  thing  once  so  instinctive  that  it  needed  no 
more  definition  than  did  "  thought "  or  "  action  " 
or  "prayer"?  Well,  we  have  made  of  an  in- 
stinct an  accessory,  and  since  such  it  has  be- 
come, and  since  it  has  almost  been  lost  in  the 
process,  we  may,  in  defiance  of  fate,  define 
again. 

Now,  none  of  us,  here  and  now,  means  what 

the  word  has  been  held  to  imply  since  the  dawn 

of  the  debatable  epoch  above  named.  We  know 

it  is  neither  a  commodity,  a  form  of  amusement, 

217 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

an  amenity  of  life,  or  even  the  guinea  stamp  of 
civilization.  Of  course,  it  is,  in  a  measure,  the 
last,  to  the  extent  that  it  is  not  a  product,  but  a 
result  of  that  quality  of  life  that  is  the  manifes- 
tation, in  time  and  space,  of  righteous  impulses 
and  modes  of  human  activity.  In  its  high 
estate  it  is  never  a  by-product  of  barbarism; 
though  it  sometimes  seems  so,  as  in  the  case  of 
the  Renaissance  where  we  find  most  noble  art 
synchronizing  with  an  almost  complete  col- 
lapse of  Christian  civilization.  The  same  thing 
has  happened  before,  and  will  again,  for  while 
all  sound  and  wholesome  and  well-balanced  life 
of  necessity  expresses  itself  in  that  instinctive 
art  which  is  the  art  of  the  people,  this  great  art 
product  seldom  achieves  its  perfect  fruition 
until  after  the  great  impulse  that  created  it  has 
broken  down  and  yielded  to  inevitable  degen- 
eration. Thus  we  find  the  most  splendid,  if  not 
the  most  noble,  Gothic  architecture  blossoming 
in  the  fourteenth  century  after  the  high  tide  of 
mediaevalism  had  begun  to  ebb ;  while  painting 
reached  its  climax  during  the  unspeakable  bar- 
barism of  the  epoch  of  the  Medici  and  the 
Borgia ;  Shakespeare  and  his  circle  —  soul- 

218 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

children  of  the  Catholic  Middle  Ages  —  weav- 
ing the  glamour  of  their  divine  genius  over  the 
decadent  era  of  Elizabeth;  and  music,  most 
subtle  of  all  the  arts,  giving  to  Protestant  Ger- 
many a  glory  that  by  her  intrinsic  nature  she 
could  scarcely  claim. 

In  these  and  the  similar  cases  in  earlier  his- 
tory there  is  no  discrepancy,  no  ground  for 
arguing  that  art  is  a  natural  product  either  of 
heresy,  immorality,  or  disorder :  born  of  right- 
eousness of  impulse  and  sanity  of  life,  it  is  the 
longest  to  endure,  lingering  like  the  afterglow 
long  past  the  actual  setting  of  the  sun,  —  a 
memory  and  at  the  same  time  a  hope. 

In  a  time  that  is  curiously  prone  to  false  esti- 
mates of  comparative  values,  that  is  positively 
triumphant  in  its  capacity  for  misjudging  the 
quality  of  essentials,  we  measure  nearly  all  the 
arts  by  the  dazzling  products  of  the  last  great 
geniuses  who  linger  beyond  their  time,  quite 
forgetting  the  centuries  of  less  splendid  activity 
that,  manifesting,  as  they  did,  the  art  instinct 
of  a  people,  were  intrinsically  nobler,  and  in 
themselves  were  the  energy  behind  the  corus- 
cating stars  of  a  rocket  that  had  already  burst. 

219 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

In  judging  art,  in  determining  its  function,  in 
estimating  its  potency,  it  is  necessary,  there- 
fore, to  go  behind  the  evidences  of  Rouen  and 
the  chapel  of  Henry  VII,  of  Botticelli  and  Tin- 
toretto, of  Shakespeare  and  Marlowe,  of  Bach 
and  Beethoven,  —  to  name  only  the  latest  of 
the  great  periods  of  history,  —  and  to  regard 
that  wonder-work  of  the  great  centuries  from 
Gregory  VII  to  the  exile  at  Avignon,  which  is 
the  true  product  of  a  triumphant  Christian 
civilization. 

And  so  regarded,  we  find  that  art,  as  I  have 
already  said,  is  neither  a  commodity,  nor  a  form 
of  amusement,  nor  an  amenity  of  life,  but  a 
wonderful  attribute  of  man  who  is  made  in 
God's  image,  a  subtle  language,  and  a  mystery 
that,  in  its  nature,  we  may  with  reverence  call 
sacramental. 

This,  I  believe,  is  the  secret  and  the  function 
of  art.  It  is  a  language  of  divine  revelation,  the 
great  sequence  of  mystical  symbols  that  alone 
are  adequate  and  efficient  when  the  soul  of  man 
enters  into  the  infinite  realm  of  eternal  truth. 
To  each  its  proper  tongue:  to  reason,  dealing 
with  phenomena  and  their  knowable  relations, 

220 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

the  language  of  natural  science  and  of  natural 
philosophy;  to  the  soul,  by  the  grace  of  God 
penetrating  beyond  the  veil  that  limits  our 
mortal  sense,  achieving  the  quest  of  the  Holy 
Grail  of  ultimate  truth,  the  language  of  art, 
which  is  beauty,  sacramentally  comprehended, 
sacramentally  employed.  Other  language  there 
is  none :  before  the  Beatific  Vision,  even  though 
now  we  see  it  as  in  a  glass,  darkly,  even  though 
the  symbol  alone  is  all  our  undeveloped  spirit- 
uality can  apprehend,  the  language  that  is  so 
adequate  for  dealing  with  the  mere  accidents 
and  phenomena  of  the  Absolute  fails  utterly 
before  the  dim  vision  of  the  substance  that  lies 
behind,  informing  all.  Natural  science  and 
natural  philosophy  are  sufficient  unto  them- 
selves: they  need  no  aid  from  the  Pentecostal 
tongues  of  art ;  but  religion,  which  deals  alone 
with  ultimate  realities,  finds  in  the  "form  of 
sound  words"  only  her  panoply  of  defence 
against  the  insolence  of  insubordinate  reason; 
for  her  self-revelation,  for  the  communicating 
of  her  infinitely  higher  and  more  subliminal 
reason,  she  turns  to  the  tongue  God  gave  her 
to  this  end,  to  painting,  sculpture,  and  archi- 

221 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

tecture ;  to  poetry,  music,  the  drama,  and  cere- 
monial; to  art,  the  great  symbol;  to  art,  the 
language  of  the  soul. 

Postulating  this  of  art  in  its  intrinsic  nature, 
let  me  say  at  once  that  I  do  not  confine  the 
thing  itself  simply  to  the  great  arts  already 
named;  as  there  are  seven  sacraments  defined 
by  the  Church,  while  nevertheless  the  sacra- 
mental quality  extends,  in  varying  degrees, 
into  infinite  ramifications  throughout  creation, 
so  art  itself,  which  is  made  up  of  seven  major 
modes,  reaches  out  into  innumerable  fields  of 
potent  activity.  Beauty  is  the  instrument  of 
art ;  without  it  art  does  not  exist,  and  wherever 
beauty  is  used  either  for  self-revelation  or  for 
the  communicating  of  spiritual  energy,  there  is 
art,  whether  it  be  in  the  majestic  modes  of  mu- 
sic and  architecture,  or  in  the  modest  ministry 
of  woodcarving  or  embroidery.  The  existence 
and  manifestation  of  beauty  is  the  one  test,  the 
philosopher's  stone  that  transmutes  the  base 
metal  of  reason  into  the  fine  gold  of  spiritual 
revelation. 

Now,  I  do  not  mean  to  involve  myself  in  the 
perilous  definition  of  this  mystical  and  incom- 

222 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

prehensible  thing,  beauty;  says  St.  Thomas  a 
Kempis,  in  writing  of  the  sublime  Mystery  of 
the  Catholic  Faith,  "'Twere  well  not  to  in- 
quire too  curiously  into  the  nature  of  this  holy 
sacrament ";  and  the  same  warning  may  well 
be  held  in  mind  when  we  approach  the  mystery 
of  beauty.  It  is,  and  its  operations  are  acknowl- 
edged; this  is  really  all  we  need  to  know.  In 
this  paper  I  am  supposed  to  deal  only  with  this 
operation,  and  in  the  one  category  of  architec- 
ture, so  all  that  is  needed  is  the  confession  we 
all  can  make  that  beauty  exists  and  that  it  is  the 
great  symbolic  language  of  the  soul,  whether  it 
manifests  itself  through  colour  or  form  or  light 
and  shade,  through  tone,  melody,  harmony  and 
rhythm,  or  through  any  combination  of  these, 
or  any  other  of  the  numberless  modes  of  its  ex- 
pression. 

It  may  be  said  that  not  the  half  of  art  is  thus 
specifically  spiritual  in  its  activity ;  that  in  whole 
schools  and  for  long  periods  of  time  art  of  noble 
quality  is  followed  and  determined  solely  for 
the  sheer  joy  of  pleasurable  sensations.  This 
we  may  admit,  for  conscious  revelation  of  higher 
things  is  no  essential  part  of  art ;  my  only  con- 
223 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

tention  is  that  it  alone  has  been  so  used,  and 
may  be  again,  even  though  for  generations  we 
may,  in  our  hardness  of  heart,  deny  the  very 
existence  of  any  realm  of  truth  beyond  that 
accidental  domain  of  the  material  and  the  con- 
ditioned, which  from  time  to  time  obsesses  men 
with  the  delusion  of  its  own  finality.  And  even 
here  I  think  the  thesis  might  be  defended  that 
this  very  sensuous  satisfaction,  as  we  call  it,  is 
not  sensuous  at  all,  but  the  blind  answering  of 
an  atrophied  soul  to  a  spiritual  stimulus,  the 
noble  nature  of  which  is  disregarded  or  denied. 
The  obvious  melodies  of  popular  music,  the 
rudimentary  colour-harmonies  of  popular  paint- 
ing, the  superficial  jingles  of  popular  verse,  are 
pleasurable  to  those  who  like  them,  not  because 
of  some  satisfying  titillation  of  the  sensory 
nerves,  but  because  they,  even  they,  are  in- 
formed with  some  faint  and  far-blown  scent  of 
mystical  fields,  and  strange  gardens  seen  in  for- 
gotten dreams ;  because  each  one,  however  nar- 
row the  vista  it  reveals,  is  in  some  sense  one  of 
those 

"  Magic  casements  opening  on  the  foam 
Of  perilous  seas,  by  faery  lands  forlorn  "  — 

224 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

that  are  the  avenues  of  spiritual  revelation 
through  the  mystical  agency  of  art. 

On  this  very  matter  writes  that  beautiful 
soul,  Sir  Thomas  Browne:  "For  even  that 
vulgar  and  Tavern-Musick,  which  makes  one 
man  merry,  another  mad,  strikes  in  me  a  deep 
fit  of  devotion,  and  a  profound  contemplation  of 
the  First  Composer.  There  is  something  in  it  of 
Divinity  more  than  the  ear  discovers:  it  is  an 
Hieroglyphical  and  shadowed  lesson  of  the 
whole  World,  and  creatures  of  God;  such  a 
melody  to  the  ear,  as  the  whole  World,  well 
understood,  would  afford  the  understanding. 
In  brief,  it  is  a  sensible  fit  of  that  harmony 
which  intellectually  sounds  in  the  ears  of  God." 

This  by  the  way,  for  our  inquiry  is  not 
here,  and  I  try  to  return  to  the  path  that  may, 
in  the  end,  lead  at  the  very  last  to  our  subject. 

I  have  said  enough  to  indicate  what  I  mean 
when  I  speak  of  all  art  as  the  natural,  and,  in- 
deed, the  only  adequate,  expression  in  time  and 
space  of  spiritual  things.  If  it  is  this,  then  it  fol- 
lows of  necessity  that  it  is  the  ordained  language 
of  religion,  for  religion,  through  theology,  is  the 
divine  science  which  is  higher  than  all  natural 

225 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

sciences,  in  that  it  deals  with  Absolute  Truth 
through  perfectly  adequate  agencies,  while  the 
natural  sciences  deal  only  with  finite  phenom- 
ena through  agencies  adequate  to  this  end  and 
to  this  alone.  It  follows,  then,  that  preemi- 
nently and  in  a  very  special  fashion  art  is,  or 
should  be,  a  matter  of  absolutely  vital  import- 
ance to  religion,  since  it  is  ordered  by  God  Him- 
self as  its  mode  of  visible  manifestation.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  this  always  has  been  so  from 
the  very  beginnings  of  recorded  history.  "God 
has  never  left  Himself  without  a  witness";  and 
even  in  the  ethnic  religions  of  antiquity,  or  the 
paganism  that  preceded  the  Incarnation,  or  in 
the  pseudo-religious  philosophies  of  the  East, 
the  dim  witnesses  of  God  have  made  for  them- 
selves out  of  art  in  all  its  forms  witnesses  before 
men  of  whatever  shadowy  glimmerings  of  truth 
were  given  to  them.  Babylon,  Assyria,  Egypt, 
all  wrought  for  themselves  great  art,  but  always 
the  beginnings  were  at  the  hands  of  priests  and 
prophets,  and  however  great  the  secular  art 
that  ensued,  always  its  greatest  glories  were 
achieved  in  religious  service.  And  so  through 
history,  century  after  century,  through  the 

226 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

fastidious  and  exquisite  temples  of  Greece  and 
the  half-barbarian  "grandeur  that  was  Rome," 
to  the  solemn  basilicas  of  Constantine,  the 
golden  and  glimmering  shrines  of  Justinian,  the 
grave  majesty  of  the  churches  of  Charlemagne, 
the  towering  abbeys  of  Frank  and  Norman 
Benedictines,  the  first  fine  Gothic  of  the  Cister- 
cian monasteries,  to  the  crowning  glory  of  the 
mediaeval  cathedrals  of  France  and  the  abbeys 
of  England.  Even  when  civilization  was  break- 
ing down  under  the  assaults  of  the  new  pagan- 
ism after  the  exile  at  Avignon  and  the  fall  of 
Constantinople,  it  was  religion,  whatever  we 
may  think  of  its  momentary  condition,  that  was 
still,  through  the  visible  Church,  leading  the 
van  in  the  building-up  of  a  new  though  fictitious 
form  of  art ;  and  it  was  not  until  the  Reforma- 
tion that,  for  the  first  time  in  the  history  of  the 
world,  organized  religion  turned  against  art, 
and,  denying  its  virtue  or  its  efficacy,  devoted 
itself  to  the  destruction  of  what  it  had  created 
and  what  had  been,  in  solemn  fact,  one  of  its 
most  potent  agencies  of  operation.  And  then 
followed,  also  for  the  first  time  in  history,  that 
ominous  thing,  the  extinction  of  all  art,  of  every 

227 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

kind  whatever,  as  an  attribute  of  human  life,  as 
a  heritage  of  civilization.  Indeed,  what  actu- 
ally ensued  was  worse  even  than  extinction :  it 
was  the  substitution,  first,  of  something  with 
little  beauty  and  with  no  art  at  all  in  place  of 
the  perfect  beauty  man  already  had  perfectly 
made  manifest;  then  the  wild  yet  deliberate 
beating  down  and  utter  destruction  of  these 
dumb  memorials  of  a  great  material  and  spirit- 
ual past;  and  finally,  the  setting-up,  for  the 
worship  of  degenerate  society,  of  the  brazen 
images  of  ugliness.  A  stranger  and  more  omin- 
ous thing  than  this  history  has  hardly  recorded. 
We  have  seen,  and  many  times,  the  perishing 
of  great  civilizations :  the  flowering  of  art  during 
some  epoch  of  splendid  development,  and  its 
slow  dissolution  after  that  epoch  had  yielded 
to  the  law  of  the  world,  which  is  the  law  of  de- 
generation, in  opposition  to  the  law  of  the 
spirit,  which  is  the  law  of  regeneration  and  de- 
velopment. We  have  seen  the  exquisite  art  of 
Greece  go  down  in  the  wake  of  Greek  civiliza- 
tion, while  the  art  of  Rome  that  followed  on  was 
immeasurably  less  noble  and  complete.  In  its 
turn  we  have  beheld  the  fall  of  Rome  and  the 

228 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

coming  of  the  Dark  Ages,  with  even  here,  at  the 
height  of  such  culture  as  came  during  a  barbar- 
ian cycle,  art  that  was  art  still,  though  less  ad- 
mirable even  than  that  which  developed  under 
"the  drums  and  tramplings  of  three  conquests/' 
Then  at  last  this  also  was  gone  with  the  dying 
of  the  "false  dawn"  of  Carlovingian  civiliza- 
tion, and  night  fell  again,  deeper  than  ever 
before ;  night  that  was  to  be  dispelled  for  cen- 
turies, a  little  later,  when  the  mingling  of 
Northern  blood  with  the  great  life-current  of  a 
regenerated  monasticism  was  to  make  possible 
the  first  great  triumph  of  Christian  civilization. 
Time  upon  time  it  has  seemed  that  art  has 
been  lost ;  but  even  in  the  deepest  depths  it  has 
struggled  for  light,  and  never  once  has  it  been 
false  to  its  own  nature.  There  might  be  little, 
and  that  little  poor,  but  its  impulse  was  always 
right,  until  that  great  world-drama  (the  three 
acts  of  which  we  call  the  Renaissance,  the 
Reformation,  and  the  Revolution)  took  posses- 
sion of  the  stage ;  and  since  then  the  tale  has 
been  different.  The  Renaissance,  by  its  false 
doctrine  of  the  sufficiency  of  the  intellect,  set  up 
a  scholastic  and  artificial  theory  of  the  nature 
229 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

of  beauty  and  the  function  of  art ;  the  Reforma- 
tion, by  its  substitution  of  a  manufactured 
religion  for  that  of  God's  Revelation,  dried  up 
the  springs  of  spiritual  energy  which  are  the 
source  of  the  art-impulse ;  the  Revolution  shook 
the  very  foundations  of  religious  society  and 
established  economic  conditions  in  which  art 
could  no  longer  endure;  while  all  these  cata- 
clysms, as  a  by-product  of  their  activity,  an- 
nihilated a  good  half  of  the  monuments  of 
past  generations,  and  denied  the  virtue  of  the 
poor  remainder  they  did  not  destroy. 

It  was  the  greatest  break-down  on  record, 
and  the  results  were  commensurate  with  the 
cause.  Art  was  gone,  for  the  first  time  in  his- 
tory; and  with  the  opening  of  the  nineteenth 
century  not  only  was  the  world  more  empty 
than  ever  before,  but  there  were  false  gods  in 
every  shrine,  hideous  idols  of  the  worship  of 
ugliness  and  lies.  Here  and  there  was  a  voice 
crying  in  the  wilderness,  but  when  it  became 
audible  over  the  din  of  an  uncouth  saturnalia, 
it  was  the  voice  of  a  painter,  a  poet,  or  a  musi- 
cian;  sculptor  and  architect  had  "none  so  mean 
as  to  do  them  reverence." 

230 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

And  now  the  wheel  has  come  full  turn,  and 
everywhere  is  a  feverish  effort  at  artistic  res- 
toration. We  are  ashamed,  and  we  seek  for 
the  wherewithal  to  cover  our  aesthetic  naked- 
ness ;  more  than  this,  the  old  virus  is  working 
itself  out :  the  fruits  of  the  Renaissance,  Refor- 
mation, and  Revolution  have  been  eaten,  the 
good  is  by  way  of  being  assimilated,  the  evil 
rejected,  and  the  gray  dawn  of  a  new  day  light- 
ens on  the  hills.  In  spite  of  the  curial  inepti- 
tudes of  Rome,  the  invincible  Erastianism  of 
the  East,  the  uncertainties  of  our  own  estate ;  in 
spite  of  the  momentary  triumph  of  atheism  and 
anarchy  in  France,  the  outbreak  of  unearthly 
heresies  and  superstitions  in  Russia  and  New 
England,  and  the  apparent  victory  of  secular- 
ism in  education ;  in  spite  of  the  ethical,  politi- 
cal, industrial,  and  economic  disorder,  the  doom 
of  the  post-Renaissance  era  is  sealed,  and  in  the 
midst  of  all  our  uncertainties  one  thing  is  glori- 
ously certain,  and  that  is  that  a  new  epoch  is 
dawning  when  religion  will  once  more  achieve 
its  due  supremacy  over  man  and  nations,  the 
Catholic  Faith  regain  its  beneficent  dominion 
over  the  souls  that  God  made  in  His  own  image. 
231 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

It  is  this  conviction,  whether  avowed  or  hid- 
den, whether  conscious  or  latent,  that  lies  at 
the  base  of  the  great  turning  of  religion  to  art 
once  more  in  these  latest  days.  Not  the  desire 
of  emulation,  not  the  hunger  for  refinements  of 
culture,  but  the  dawning  consciousness  that 
each  one  of  the  arts  is  by  right  a  paladin  of  the 
new  crusade,  that  they  are  all,  by  the  nature 
given  them  by  God,  soldiers  of  the  Cross,  and 
that  their  hearts  and  their  swords  are  not 
lightly  to  be  despised  in  the  new  winning  of  the 
world  to  Christ. 

Michelet  has  somewhere  said  that  "history  is 
only  a  series  of  resurrections  " ;  and  this  is  what 
the  Church  is  doing  to-day  —  returning  to  the 
old  and  tried  methods  of  the  past,  when  the 
builder  and  painter  and  carver,  the  musician 
and  poet  and  maker  of  liturgies,  marched  side 
by  side  with  the  prophet  and  monk  and  mis- 
sionary into  the  strongholds  of  barbarism  and 
infidelity,  putting  into  visible  and  audible 
form  the  faith  they  practised. 

No  other  course  was  possible.  Since  beauty 
is  the  revelation  of  all  that  lies  beyond  the  hori- 
zon of  our  finite  vision,  art,  which  is  beauty 

232 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

organized  and  made  operative,  becomes  the 
great  language  of  the  soul,  and  therefore  it  is 
crushed,  mutilated,  impotent  when  it  remains 
in  bondage  to  material  things,  while  without  it 
religion  is  shorn  of  one  of  her  greatest  agencies 
of  self-expression  and  of  influence.  This  is  the 
meaning  of  the  wonderful  revival  of  religious 
art  of  every  kind  that  began  simultaneously 
with  the  spiritual  upheaval  of  the  Oxford 
Movement,  and  has  kept  pace,  step  by  step, 
with  the  growing  consciousness  of  her  Catholic 
heritage  which,  for  now  three  quarters  of  a  cen- 
tury, has  penetrated  the  Church  of  the  English- 
speaking  race.  This  is  the  meaning  of  the  new 
life  in  religious  painting  and  sculpture ;  in  glass- 
making  and  metal-working  and  embroidery;  in 
architecture,  music,  and  ceremonial.  We  look, 
sometimes  with  amusement,  sometimes  with 
horror,  on  the  ecclesiastical  fabrics  of  the  early 
nineteenth  century,  on  the  barren  and  hideous 
forms,  the  apologetic  music,  the  thin  and  enerv- 
ated ceremonial.  Now  we,  and  not  we  alone, 
but  all  Protestantism  with  us,  are  building 
churches  as  near  in  spirit  and  in  form  to  those 
of  the  great  Middle  Ages  as  the  somewhat  lim- 
233 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

ited  capacities  of  our  architects  will  permit :  we 
demand  the  glass  of  Chartres  and  York,  the 
sculptures  of  Amiens  and  Wells,  the  gold  and 
silver  and  brass  and  iron  of  Hildesheim  and 
Venice  and  Dalmatia,  the  pictures  of  Umbria, 
the  music  of  Milan,  the  vestments  of  the  treas- 
uries of  Spain.  Daily  our  ceremonial  grows 
richer  and  more  beautiful,  and  its  widening 
ring  takes  in,  one  after  another,  men  and  places 
that  but  a  few  years  ago  were  staunch  defenders, 
if  not  of  Calvinistic  theology,  at  least  of  Calvin- 
istic  art.  Even  the  old  shibboleth  of  "Roman- 
izing, Romanizing,"  is  heard  no  more,  for  its 
absurdity  is  recognized,  and  the  basic  impulse 
of  religious  art  is  seen  to  be  other  than  a  pre- 
liminary symptom  of  disaffection.  It  is  not 
because  we  want  something  that  Rome  alone 
has  got,  but  because  at  last  we  know  we  have  it 
also,  the  thing  itself,  that  we  return  to  our  sis- 
ter, Beauty,  and  call  upon  her  once  again  to  cry 
to  all  the  manifold  products  of  God's  hand, 
"O  all  ye  works  of  the  Lord,  bless  ye  the  Lord, 
praise  Him  and  magnify  Him  forever." 

The  theological  peculiarities  of  Geneva  and 
Edinburgh  can  adequately  be  communicated  by 

234 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

the  spoken  and  unadorned  word:  the  marvel- 
lous mysteries  of  the  Catholic  Faith  breathe 
themselves  into  the  spiritual  consciousness 
through  the  mediumship  of  art. 

To  every  movement,  then,  toward  the 
restoration  of  diplomatic  relations  between 
religion  and  art,  the  Church  must  give  her 
earnest  support.  Everywhere  the  artist  and 
the  craftsman  are  looking  wistfully  toward  the 
old-time  mistress  of  their  art.  Usually  they 
have  lost  their  faith,  and  they  are  not  wholly  to 
blame  for  it ;  but  in  their  art  lies  the  possibility 
of  their  conversion,  or  at  least  the  assurance 
that,  accepted,  it  will  be  easier  for  those  that 
follow  to  regain  their  faith,  or  hold  it  whole  and 
intact.  To  all  the  workers  in  all  the  arts  the 
Church  must  now  go,  saying,  "We  made  you; 
we  forsook  you ;  we  are  sorry;  and  now  we  need 
you  again :  give  us  of  your  best  that  we  may 
offer  it  on  the  altar  of  God." 

"The  best."  Here,  perhaps,  lies  the  kernel  of 
it  all.  For  centuries  we  have  taken  the  worst, 
and  as  little  of  that  as  possible ;  now  we  take 
anything  that  comes  along,  not  from  perver- 
sity but  from  lack  of  knowledge,  and  from  a 

235 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

certain  innocent  trustfulness  that  takes  a  man 
—  and  particularly  an  artist  —  at  his  own 
valuation,  or  at  least  at  the  valuation  placed 
upon  him  by  some  person  or  thing  of  which  we 
stand  in  awe.  Late  Italian  Mass  music  and 
decadent  ceremonial ;  plausible  and  loudly  her- 
alded stained  glass  of  barbaric  splendour ;  com- 
mercial products  in  metal  and  woodwork,  sac- 
charine statues  —  sometimes  of  plaster  —  of 
the  type  dear  to  the  heart  of  the  Latin  "par- 
rocchio";  imitation  Gothic  architecture  —  also 
sometimes  of  plaster,  with  a  little  harmless, 
necessary  steel  or  iron  encased  within.  We  want 
the  real  thing,  the  real  beauty,  the  real  art,  but 
the  trouble  is  we  sometimes  can  be  induced  to 
accept  a  substitute,  while  sometimes  also  the 
best  of  us  know  too  well  what  we  like,  and  this 
is  always  dangerous. 

"  The  first  battle  has  been  won  —  the  battle 
for  Beauty;  we  know  now  that  this  we  must 
have ;  now  let  us  establish  the  victory  by  win- 
ning the  battle  for  Truth. 

And  this  does  not  mean  the  easy  victory  over 
plaster  and  papier-m&che,  gold-leaf  and  lac- 
quer, imitation  marble,  steel  covered  with  con- 

236 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

crete,  and  all  the  other  substitutes  that  are  now 
so  tempting  to  the  eye  hungry  for  beauty  com- 
bined with  the  emaciated  purse.  It  means  the 
far  more  arduous  battle  for  the  fundamental 
truth  of  aesthetic  ideals,  for  art  that  shall  be 
significant,  and  vital  with  the  breath  of  the 
great  art  of  the  past. 

It  is  not  the  fault  of  the  priest,  or  the  building 
committee,  or  the  altar  society  that  here  we  so 
often  fail ;  it  is  the  fault,  in  great  measure,  of  the 
artist ;  but  I  honestly  believe  he  himself  is  only 
a  victim  of  that  most  pernicious  and  devil- 
engendered  principle  of  the  present  age,  namely, 
"Give  the  people  what  they  want."  Of  course, 
any  society  that  acts  on  that  basis  has  its  end- 
ing in  the  pit  of  perdition ;  but  this  we  do  not 
see  with  perfect  clarity,  and  so  the  artist  pros- 
titutes his  God-given  art  to  the  false  ideal  of 
what  is  demanded  of  him.  He  is  wrong;  no  one 
nowadays  wants  anything  but  the  best  in  art  — 
which  is  one  of  the  most  encouraging  signs  in 
a  dubious  day;  but  this  demand  is  not  always 
couched  in  unmistakable  terms.  Be  specific, 
make  it  clear  that  you  look  on  the  artist  as 
a  minister  in  minor  orders,  and  that  on  him 
237 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

alone  rests  the  obligation  to  make  his  work,  in 
however  small  a  degree,  a  revelation  of  spiritual 
truth,  and  I  do  not  think  he  will  fail  you. 

I  do  not  mean  that  as  yet  any  artist  can 
safely  be  given  his  head ;  least  of  all,  the  ar- 
chitect. Art  is  still  in  bondage  to  that  spirit  of 
the  Renaissance-Reformation-Revolution  the 
Church  has  now  freed  herself  from  to  so  sur- 
prising a  degree;  but  I  do  mean  that  the  time 
has  come  when  a  principle  only  may  safely  be 
enunciated,  the  details  being  left  wholly  to  the 
artist.  It  is  not  so  long  ago  that  priests  who  had 
read  Parker's  "Glossary,"  or  some  handbook 
on  church-building,  or  had  spent  a  summer  in 
England,  felt  it  their  duty  to  instruct  an  archi- 
tect as  to  the  working-out  of  his  plans,  even 
in  some  cases  demanding  that  some  church  or 
other  in  England  should  be  duplicated.  Well, 
this  was  bad  enough,  but  I  dare  say  better  than 
the  terrible  things  that  might  have  happened  — 
and  did  happen,  for  that  matter  —  when  the 
architect  was  permitted  to  give  free  rein  to  his 
fervid  imagination.  In  any  case,  this  time  has 
gone,  and  in  spite  of  the  schools  of  architecture 
there  are  now  many  artists  of  every  kind  —  and 

238 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

paiticularly  architects  —  who  may  safely  be 
trusted  to  do  honourable  and  competent  work. 
Nevertheless,  there  is  still  one  function  that  the 
priest,  or,  better  still,  the  Church,  must  per- 
form, and  that  is  the  laying-down  of  the  funda- 
mental law  of  all  religious  art. 

What  is  this  law  ?  It  is  a  very  simple  one, 
namely,  that  religious  art  must  express,  not  the 
predilections  of  one  man,  or  the  arbitrary  the- 
ories of  a  school,  but  the  Church  herself;  in 
other  words,  a  divine  institution  unchangeable 
in  essentials,  infinitely  adaptable  in  everything 
else.  And  this  means  that  whatever  is  done 
must  be  faithful,  first  of  all,  to  the  universal 
laws  of  Christian  art ;  then,  that  it  must  pre- 
serve an  unbroken  continuity  with  the  art  of 
our  own  blood  and  race;  and  finally,  that  it 
must  declare  itself  of  our  own  time  as  to  the 
accidents  of  its  expression. 

Several  principles  develop  from  this:  under 
the  first  heading  we  are  forced  back  five  cen- 
turies to  the  time  when  Christian  art  came  to 
an  end ;  across  the  desert  wastes  of  Protestant- 
ism and  the  opulent  gardens  of  neo-paganism, 
back  to  the  Middle  Ages,  when  the  living 
239 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

stream,  that  had  refreshed  a  thirsty  land  from 
before  the  days  of  Hellas  and  Byzantium,  disap- 
peared below  the  surface  into  some  subterra- 
nean channel  wherefrom  comes  now  only  the 
murmur  of  troubled  waters  impatient  for 
release.  So  far  as  the  art  expression  of  religion 
is  concerned,  nothing  has  happened  since  the  fall 
of  Constantinople  in  which  we  need  display  any 
particular  interest.  Back  to  medievalism  we 
must  go,  and  begin  again.  And  as  to  continuity, 
that  indispensable  succession  that  alone  insures 
the  vitality  of  art  while  it  parallels  that  apostol- 
ical succession  which  alone  insures  the  divine 
vitality  of  the  Catholic  Church,  it  means  that 
we  are  not  at  liberty  to  pick  and  choose  among 
the  tentative  styles  of  a  crescent  Christianity, 
but  that  we  must  return  to  the  one  style  our 
forefathers  at  last  created  for  the  full  expres- 
sion of  their  blood  and  faith.  Lombard  we  may 
like,  or  Byzantine,  or  Norman,  or  Romanesque, 
but  they  are  not  for  us,  for  they  were  stepping- 
stones  only,  not  accomplished  facts.  Those  that 
were  of  the  South  or  the  East  are  of  alien  blood. 
Our  Church  and  we  ourselves  are  of  the  North, 
northern.  We  are  of  them  that  purged  the 
240 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

world  of  a  great  paganism,  dead,  and  infecting 
all  Europe  with  the  miasma  of  its  corruption. 
Frank  and  Teuton,  Norman  and  Burgundian, 
Celt  and  Saxon  and  Dane  are  in  our  blood  and 
bone  and  our  very  flesh,  and  for  the  major  part 
of  what  we  are  we  owe  an  everlasting  debt  to 
this  fierce  blood  of  the  Baltic  shores,  tamed  and 
turned  into  righteous  courses  by  the  monks  of 
St.  Benedict,  St.  Robert,  St.  Bernard,  and  St. 
Norbert. 

We  forget  it  all,  for  a  time,  but  we  return  at 
last,  and  as  now  perhaps  the  most  significant 
thing  in  the  development  of  our  own  moiety  of 
the  Church  is  the  restoration  of  that  monasti- 
cism  which  was  the  engendering  fire  of  Chris- 
tian medievalism,  so  by  inevitable  analogy  we 
return  to  the  art  that  blossomed  in  the  gardens 
the  monks  made  in  the  wilderness ;  to  the  heri- 
tage of  our  name  and  race,  the  Gothic  of 
France  and  England  and  of  all  our  own  north 
countries,  washed  by  our  own  north  seas.  Yet 
there  is  danger  in  this  —  the  danger  of  archaeo- 
logical dry  rot.  We  must  begin  somewhere ;  we 
no  longer  have  within  ourselves  the  power  of 
artistic  generation ;  and  even  if  we  had,  if  we 
241 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

could  produce  an  art  like  that  of  Paris  or  Can- 
terbury or  York  out  of  our  own  inner  selves,  we 
should  lack  the  right,  for  we  must  above  all 
things  show  that  our  religion  stretches,  without 
a  break,  through  mediaevalism  and  the  Dark 
Ages,  to  Calvary.  Gothic  architecture  and 
Gothic  art  do  this,  for  in  them  are  gathered  up 
and  perfected  all  the  tentative  efforts  of  all 
Christendom ;  but  if  we  stop  there  we  deny  the 
Faith,  for  we  know  that  in  accordance  with  the 
promise  of  Christ  He  is  with  His  Church  even 
unto  the  end  of  the  world,  and  that  through  the 
abiding  presence  of  the  Holy  Spirit  she  is  being 
led  into  all  truth.  The  Christian  life  is  a  life  of 
progressive  development ;  the  life  of  the  Church 
is  no  other ;  and  little  by  little  new  aspects  of  old 
wonders  are  opened  before  our  eyes.  Therefore, 
our  art  must  content  itself  with  no  finalities ;  it 
must  grow  ever  and  onward,  from  the  highest 
point  thus  far  it  has  reached,  the  mountain 
summit  of  mediaevalism,  from  whose  cloud- 
encircled  top  dim  visions  already  unroll  of  still 
loftier  summits,  accessible  at  last,  once  we  for- 
sake the  mistaken  path  that  long  ago  opened 
out,  broad  and  inviting,  only  to  disappear  in  the 
242 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

morass  of  artificial  paganism.  And  so  our  new 
art,  refounded  on  the  old,  must  be  mobile, 
adaptable,  sensitive  to  all  righteous  influences, 
repellent  of  all  that  are  evil ;  not  a  simulacrum, 
but  a  living  thing. 

Is  this  too  much  to  ask?  Greater  has  been 
before,  and  with  faith  we  may  move  mountains. 

The  part  that  art  is  to  play  in  the  rebuilding 
of  a  new  civilization  is  hardly  to  be  estimated  in 
words,  and  of  all  the  arts  the  one  that  is  des- 
tined to  do  the  greatest  work  is  architecture. 
Why  this  is  so  I  confess  I  do  not  know,  but  so 
it  has  been  in  the  past.  There  is  some  strange 
quality  in  architecture  that  makes  its  spiritual 
efficiency  dominant  over  the  other  arts.  Music 
is  more  poignant,  painting  more  human  in  its 
appeal,  while  each  art  in  its  turn  exerts  some 
special  influence  beyond  the  province  of  the 
others.  Architecture  binds  them  in  one,  har- 
monizing, controlling,  directing  them,  and  lift- 
ing them  up  in  a  great  structural  Te  Deum. 

A  perfect  church,  within  whose  walls  is  pass- 
ing the  ordered  pageantry  unnumbered  genera- 
tions have  built  up  in  beauty,  and  through  the 
seven  arts,  to  do  honour  and  reverence  to  the 

243 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

Creator  and  Redeemer  of  the  world,  there 
present  in  the  Holy  Sacrament  of  the  altar,  is 
the  greatest  work  of  man.  Into  it  enters  every 
art  raised  now  to  the  highest  point  of  achieve- 
ment, and  as  architecture,  painting,  and  sculp- 
ture assemble  for  the  building  of  the  tabernacle 
itself,  so  do  music,  poetry,  the  drama,  and  cere- 
monial gather  into  another  great  work  of  art, 
that  prefigures  the  infinite  wonder  of  Heaven 
itself. 

And  we  threw  it  all  away,  once,  in  our  blind- 
ness of  heart  and  contempt  of  God's  word 
and  commandment :  blowing  up  the  matchless 
fabrics  with  gunpowder;  beating  out  the 
jewelled  windows  and  shattering  with  hammer 
and  axe  the  fretted  altars  and  shrines  and  tombs 
and  chiselled  images  of  saints  and  martyrs,  even 
the  Crucifix  itself,  the  sign  of  our  Redemption ; 
filching  the  jewels  from  vestments  and  sacred 
vessels,  casting  consecrated  gold  and  silver  into 
the  melting-pot,  turning  copes  and  chasubles 
into  bed-hangings,  and  altar-cloths  into  chair- 
cushions,  leaving  the  few  churches  we  did  not 
destroy  barren,  empty,  desolated. 

Now  we  are  doing  what  we  can  by  way  of 
244 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

amendment.  We  are  handicapped  by  the  deeds 
of  our  fathers,  and  by  their  consequences,  but 
the  restoration  must  be  accomplished,  however 
arduous  the  effort. 

And  the  reward  is  worthy  the  effort.  Create 
in  imagination  the  figure  of  what  may  be  again: 
cathedrals  like  those  of  Paris  and  Chartres  and 
Gloucester  and  Exeter;  sculptures  like  the 
marshalled  saints  of  Amiens  and  Wells,  pic- 
tures and  altar-pieces  like  those  of  Giotto  and 
Fra  Angelico;  windows  that  rival  those  of 
Bourges  and  York;  the  beating  of  sublime 
Gregorian  chants  like  the  echo  of  heavenly 
harmonies ;  and  ceremonial  that  absorbs  half  of 
the  regenerated  arts,  composing  them  into  a 
whole  that  is  the  perfection  of  all  that  man  can 
do  to  honour  in  material  and  sensible  form  the 
central  mystery  of  the  Catholic  Faith. 

Once  more  at  the  hand  of  man  all  the  works 
of  the  Lord  shall  praise  Him  and  magnify  Him 
forever,  and  from  every  cathedral  or  monastery 
or  parish  church  shall  go  out  the  vast,  subtle, 
insistent  missionary  influence  of  art,  again 
restored  to  her  due  place  as  the  handmaid  of 
religion ;  breaking  down  that  pride  of  intellect 
245 


THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART 

that  will  not  yield  to  intellectual  attack;  win- 
ning souls  hungry  but  defiant;  dissolving  the 
barriers  that  man  in  his  insolence  has  reared  to 
make  of  no  avail  the  prayer  of  Christ  that  all 
His  children  might  be  made  one ;  manifesting  to 
the  world  the  Absolute  Truth  and  Beauty  that 
are  the  Revelation  of  God.  Architecture,  with 
all  the  arts,  is  the  God-given  language  of 
religion.  It  has  been  too  long  in  bondage  to  the 
world ;  let  it  now  serve  God  again  through  the 
Holy  Catholic  Church. 


THE    END 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U   .   S    .   A 


I 


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